One of the core social media marketing tactics businesses rely on is influencer marketing. By creating authentic relationships with individuals who hold sway over a large group of consumers on social media, brands can harness their target audiences in a way they'll trust. After all, influencer marketing is the fastest-growing channel for customer acquisition, and 76% of marketers consider influencer engagement effective in garnering customer loyalty.
While email and influencer marketing have distinct differences, combining them offers your brand a unique opportunity to garner brand awareness and interest in your products on social media. In this article, you will learn why it is useful and how to accurately integrate both tactics.
Benefits of using influencers for email marketing
Businesses can reach a diverse group of consumers through their connections with influencers. This is effective for improving conversion rates, while also extending your brand's virtual community and building a strong relationship with a professional in your industry's social sphere. Influencers use their platforms to persuade their followers to buy the products or subscribe and promote the products as well.
On the other hand, brands can repurpose the content influencers create to fit into their email marketing campaigns. These include content like unboxing videos, product reviews, affiliate discount codes, tutorial videos, and simple posts from the influencer interacting with your product.
Generally, adding influencer content improves brand credibility via social proof. When a customer is reading your brand's newsletter or sales email, spotting an influencer they already know will increase the chance they find your business more credible.
Integrate influencer marketing and email marketing
The following are some strategies to align email and influencer marketing components together and gain unified benefits.
1. Use existing influencer content in emails
Most influencer relationships are established via social media, but that doesn't mean content needs to stay there. Showcasing the creativity that creators like influencers are already skilled at is essential in your emails. This method demonstrates authenticity in your brand-influencer relationship as well due to dual-sided publicity. In the end, you'll get significantly more value out of your influencer relationships by featuring existing influencer content you've permissioned in your promotional emails.
2. Make your email campaigns mutually beneficial
Most influencers build their following via social media platforms. By promoting influencer content in your emails, you're giving them a new avenue to reach engaged customers – who may become followers as well. By highlighting an influencer's content and providing some additional credit to their owned channels, you can create a mutually beneficial program that builds your email community through value-added content.
Zebra Pen showcases the artwork of influential graphic designers, linking to their social pages and posts as well as an interactive gallery of posts on the brand's site.
This content, while inherently promotional of your products, adds more value than your standard sales email. This also shows customers that you're focused on giving credit to the original creators of the content, thus encouraging customers to share their own content with the brand for a chance to be featured.
3. Let influencers own the email campaign
Brands tend to over-index on brand safety when it comes to influencer marketing. But by giving influencers more creative and strategic input on a campaign, you can create truly exciting and, oftentimes, vastly original campaigns. This is a great way to scale email personalization; influencers can create personalized content keeping the taste and preferences of their followers in mind. This can add a more personable edge to your emails, creating a more engaged community and, ultimately, better conversion rates overall.
4. Think macro and micro-influencers
Statistically, 67% of businesses rely on the picture-centric Instagram platform primarily for social media marketing. Images are attractive to most consumers for viewing a product or brand or developing a brand impression. Therefore, brands find visual content-based promotion more lucrative for their marketing plans. Visual marketing results in more conversions, lower bounce rates, and an increase in shares with the viewer's own community.
The marketing team of a company can opt for high-quality featured images directly from influencers of all sizes. Make use of influencer discovery to find the influencers for your brand, from smaller-scale creators to big-time celebrities, and everything in between. You can also tap into the existing wealth of content your everyday customers are already creating for you through complementing influencer content with user-generated content (UGC). By showing your customer community's organic posts with your products, you'll massively grow social proof and trust in your brand. Word-of-mouth marketing generates more than twice the sales of paid advertising, and 74% of consumers rely on social media to inform their purchasing decisions, so UGC is a guaranteed win for your emails.
Alo Yoga showcases Kendall Jenner in the brand's apparel, as seen on her Instagram, and also features fan favorites in the form of UGC from happy customers.
5. Don't stop at product images: Product reviews and unboxing videos
Product reviews and unboxing videos are commonly used formats for influencer marketing. In your emails, add helpful product reviews coupled with influencer testimonials and unboxing videos to seal the deal.
Jewelry brand Jane Koenig introduces an influencer partnership with Fia Hamelijnck and shares her favorite pieces of jewelry from the brand to inspire customers to shop.
For all subscribers, seeing new positive feedback from an individual they trust translates to increased interest in your brand. Also, the email should have detailed and real information; this increases consumers' respect for the brand. Both email marketing and influencer marketing are effective approaches for business owners to advertise their products.
With the right strategy, users can engage with more customers, increase conversion rates, sales, and brand popularity. Influencer content is powerful. So powerful that it shouldn't be siloed to one channel. By using influencers and (more broadly) social proof in the form of user-generated content in your marketing emails, you stand to improve conversion and create an airtight community of adoring fans.
This article is written by Vibhu Dhariwal, Co-Founder & Director of Marketing at Digital Gratified, a Digital Marketing & Web Development company.
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on pixlee.com. Any statistics or statements included in this article were current at the time of original publication.
