Using Google Trends to Find Email Marketing Angles That Actually Move the Needle
Most people treat Google Trends like a novelty tool. It isn't. I've spent years pulling search data for clients who were burning money on campaigns that felt right internally but had zero cultural momentum. The disconnect between what marketing teams think is trending and what people are actually searching for is something I see repeatedly. Google Trends doesn't lie about this, though it does require some patience to read correctly. When you type Popular Email Marketing On Google Trends into the search interest box, the results will look underwhelming at first glance. You'll see a line chart that's mostly flat with small bumps. That's because "email marketing" as a broad phrase is evergreen and saturated. The value comes from breaking it into subtopics, comparing regions, and layering in related queries. Start by switching the dropdown from "Web Search" to "Google Shopping" or "Image Search" if you want to see consumer intent angles. For B2B email, stick with Web Search but filter to the last 12 months minimum. Anything shorter gives you noise. Here is a practical workflow I use. Open Google Trends and set your location to the market you're targeting. Choose a 12-month window. Enter a root term like "email marketing automation" or "abandoned cart email." Then immediately click "Related queries" at the bottom and switch that tab to "Top" rather than "Rising." The Rising tab is flashy but unreliable for established categories. Top shows you what is consistently being searched alongside your term. That consistency matters more for email campaign planning than sporadic spikes.
I ran into a specific problem last year with a client in the SaaS space. We had built an entire quarter of email content around "cold email templates" because it looked like a solid related query. Google Trends showed moderate interest, so we assumed demand existed. It didn't translate to opens or clicks because the people searching for that term were competitors and agencies, not buyers. The workaround was to layer in a secondary trend check using Gmail's own autocomplete and a quick scan of Reddit threads in r/startups and r/sales. The actual search intent shifted toward "how to get replies from cold emails" and "personalized cold email examples." We pivoted the sequence entirely, and open rates went from 18 percent to 34 percent over three weeks.
Reading the Data Without Misleading Yourself
Google Trends uses a relative scale from 0 to 100, not absolute search volume. A score of 50 doesn't mean half the searches happen. It means that moment represents 50 percent of the peak interest within your chosen time range. This distinction destroys a lot of bad decisions. I've seen teams pick a lower-interest keyword over a higher one because they confused the relative score with actual volume. Always pair Trend data with something like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or even Ubersuggest to get real search volume numbers. Trends tells you direction. Keyword tools tell you scale. Seasonality is another trap. Email marketing keywords spike dramatically in January and September. Everyone knows this, but people still plan August campaigns around January-level interest data. Set your comparison to include the same month from the previous year. If you're planning a Black Friday email sequence in July, compare the current July to July of last year. The delta between those two points tells you whether growing or declining interest warrants extra budget or a message shift. Geographic breakdowns within Trends are useful if you know how to exploit them. A client of mine in the e-commerce space noticed that "post-purchase upsell email" had significantly higher interest in Canada than the United States during Q4. The data didn't explain why, but the hypothesis was strong enough to test a Canada-first rollout of a new transactional email sequence. It outperformed the US by 22 percent in revenue per send. We never did confirm the exact reason, but the trend data gave us a defensible bet instead of a guess.
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Advanced Tactics That Most People Skip
Category filtering is the feature nobody uses. When you're researching email marketing angles, click the "Category" dropdown and select "Business & industrial" or "Shopping." This strips out a lot of irrelevant results. Searching "email marketing subject lines" with no category filter pulls in a ton of educational content from universities and coding bootcamps. Adding the Shopping category shifts the signal toward commercial intent. That matters because your email list subscribers aren't students looking for a tutorial. They're people evaluating tools or offers. YouTube search is another underrated filter. Click the tab next to Web Search and select YouTube. Email marketing content performs differently on video than in text searches. People looking for "email marketing for beginners" on YouTube are often earlier in the buyer journey than those searching on Google. If your email sequence targets decision-stage prospects, YouTube trend data will mislead you. Stick to Web Search. If you're building top-of-funnel awareness content, the YouTube filter becomes valuable. One counter-intuitive insight I've learned the hard way: rising related queries are often bad signals for email marketing. They rise because they're new or niche. The people searching for them haven't formed habits yet. Your email list audience responds to terms they already use when they hit Google. Stable, medium-volume related queries outperform rising ones consistently. A related query sitting at a consistent score of 40 over six months is more actionable than one that spiked to 90 in a single month and then dropped to 20. I track stable queries manually in a spreadsheet because Google Trends doesn't give you an export of that stability metric. It takes about 20 minutes per research session, and it saves weeks of wasted campaign development.
There are hard limitations to Google Trends that worth stating plainly. It doesn't show search volume, so you can't prioritize by actual traffic potential. It aggregates data across all Google properties, so mobile versus desktop intent is invisible. It excludes personalized search results, meaning the data reflects general population interest, not your specific vertical. If you're in a niche like enterprise cybersecurity email sequences, Google Trends will flatten your signal into the broader "email marketing" category. In those cases, you need industry-specific data sources like G2 or Capterra search trends, or just dig into your own CRM data. Google Trends works best for broad consumer and mid-market B2B categories where search behavior is relatively homogenous. The tool is free and requires no account. That accessibility is also its weakness. Because anyone can use it without commitment, most people don't use it properly. Treat it as a directional compass rather than a GPS. It points you toward what's worth investigating. It doesn't replace keyword research, audience surveys, or your own performance data. When I combine Trends directionality with actual send-level metrics from previous campaigns, the planning cycle shrinks from about a week to roughly two days. That speed difference compounds over a full year of campaign iterations.
