There have been conflict between social media and email marketing during the last few years. Some observers believe email is dead. Others cite stats refuting the rumor. Wired magazine reported earlier this year “email is crushing Twitter and Facebook for selling stuff online.” And ExactTarget’s Channel Preferences survey found 77 percent of individuals wish to get marketing retailed messages through email.
ExactTarget’s 2012 Channel Preferences survey found email still trumps some other marketing channel for the way consumers would like to receive promotional messages.
While email is way from dead, you shouldn’t shun social media. The expansion is just too huge and the capability too vast. Besides, social media marketing is an efficient option to inform and enhance email marketing.
Email and Social Ought to be Used Together
Despite the rush and pull between email marketers and social media marketers, the 2 channels seem to be blending into one another. Many social media pros has been talking about email list growth recently. A considerable number of email marketers are syncing their social media to their email campaigns.
How to make use of Email and Social Together
The great way to integrate email and social is from the view of commercial strategy. The 2 marketing techniques are complex enough, and are available with enough infrastructures, it’s best to plot their marriage from a high level.
Jay Baer, founding father of Convince & Convert, a digital marketing firm, does an amazing job at framing this. He recommends putting all of the the right way to integrate social media and email into three buckets:
- Strategic integration;
- Channel and audience integration;
- Message integration.
As always, return for your business model and your online business plan. What’s your strategy for reaching customers? What’s your strategy for keeping them, and your strategy for purchasing them to spend more with you? Think long-term, high-level strategy before you wander off inside the weeds of social and email technology features and individual campaigns.
Step 1: Build it Right from the floor Up
Once you’re clear at the strategy, tackle the 1st two integration pieces.
1. Collaborate between email and social media teams. Your email marketing staff must seek advice from your social media staff, not only daily, but hourly. Actually, you will have the identical people engaged on email marketing and social media. It is a critical, structural component to bringing your email marketing and social media marketing together. Without these two teams in sync, not one of the tactics will sing.
2. Build a segmented customer database. Installed your customer database so that you know which social platforms each customer uses. This can keep you from looking foolish on your messaging, and provides you some cool capacities for crafting messages.
Step 2: Create Paths Between Email and Social Media
Next, integrate your channels. Ensure there are clear paths out of your social media outposts in your email messages and your website.
3. Add social media sharing buttons on your emails. Emails will be viral. Give your readers the tools they have to spread the word.
4. Add social media connect icons in your emails. Send them on your social platform’s main page to profit more about you.
5. Add social media engagement buttons for your email unsubscribe page. Simply because someone doesn’t would like to get your email messages to any extent further would not necessarily mean they don’t ever desire to hear from you. They might just be clearing out their inbox. Offering them a opportunity to connect to you on social media means they may be able to still keep up a correspondence, but in a less distracting way.
6. Add social media engagement buttons for your “thanks for signing up” page. It’s similar to adding social media connect icons for your emails, but in the beginning of the connection.
7. Add email opt-in prompts to your whole social media channels. Whether it’s a Facebook tab, a Twitter lead generation card or a decision to action at the last slide of your SlideShare, use your social media platforms to construct your email list.
8. Share web-based versions of your emails. Share a link to the internet-based version of your email messages on all of your social networks
9. Leverage your blog. Blogs fall under the class of social media. The content of your blog is obviously going to enter your emails. Ensure your blog has plenty of prompts to hitch your email list, and evolve beyond just an RSS feed. Use a true email corporation.
10. Leverage Pinterest. Create an archive of past emails, saved as screenshots, on your Pinterest account as a board.
11. Host contests. Use contests and sweepstakes to show fans into subscribers. Jeff Bullas, a digital guide, published some ideas on tips to try this.
Contests and sweepstakes are a great way to make use of social media to construct your email list.
12. Let subscribers promote your newsletter. Don’t just give your subscribers the way to promote each email message, give them the way to promote your newsletter. “Tweet this” prompts could also promote the newsletter, not only a single article within the newsletter.
13. Pitch your newsletter through social media. Occasionally run a pitch on your email list in your social media sites. Among the finest examples of here is marketer Chris Brogan’s Google+ video pitching his Sunday email list. A Facebook sponsored post could be a great way to advertise an email newsletter in your fans, and sure audiences within the Facebook community.
Chris Brogan generated thousands of email signups for his Sunday email newsletter with this Google+ video.
14. Drive traffic for your blog. In case you can’t, or don’t desire to, drive people on your email list, not less than drive them for your blog. Why? Because it’s a platform you own. Remember, you don’t actually own your social media platforms. Facebook can, and does, change its rules frequently.
Step 3: Integrate your Email Messages and Social Updates
After establishing a foundation for combining email marketing and social media and creating paths between the 2, it’s time to integrate your email messages and social media updates.
15. Find out about your customers. Use your social media data to determine what your customers are most excited about. Let that data inform what your next email message is set.
16. Announce upcoming emails. Announce new upcoming email messages on all of your social media accounts.
17. Send emails customized to every user’s preferred social platform. Consider it as a “Facebook digest,” or a weekly “Pinterest scrapbook.”
18. Let contacts tweet your emails. Add “retweet” links on your email messages to encourage your recipients to share them on Twitter.
19. Encourage user interaction. Try adding exceptional fan posts and comments on your email content. Just make certain your fans know that you just might do that with their content.
20. Test your email messages. Testing subject lines, offers, and formats from emails can inform your social media posts.
21. Have your entire employees install the Rapportive app for Gmail. This isn’t a platform tweak at the scale of coordinating messages, nevertheless it is likely one of the best how you can make email more social. Rapportive will show you a sender’s Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ accounts, right next to the e-mail message. You’ll have the capacity to see their last three tweets, Like them on Facebook or connect to them on LinkedIn. It’s an incredible shortcut for doing social media from within your inbox.