Email marketing and social media go hand in hand.
Marketers need to understand that an effective marketing strategy is not social media versus email marketing. Instead, marketers must combine social media with email strategies.
Email marketing remains a valuable tool when it comes to customer acquisition and lead nurturing campaigns. However, if you want to reinvent marketing opportunities and take your business to new heights, you should consider incorporating social media in your email campaigns.
What are the benefits of social media and email marketing integration?
Here are six reasons why social media and email marketing integration can be beneficial to your brand:
1. Enhance the marketing metrics
Applying the principles of social media marketing in your emails allows your readers to share the email more easily and improves the likelihood of getting better opens and click-throughs. This, in turn, enhances the conversion rate of your email marketing campaigns.
2. Get more subscribers on your list
If people talk about your emails or post about them on social media, it will enhance the word-of-mouth publicity for your brand. More people will get a chance to learn about your emails and thus, you will have a higher chance of growing your email subscription list.
3. Recognize the pre-eminent influencers
Based on the information retrieved from the email service providers, you can determine the consistent email openers and conversions. This data can be used to harness the power of these subscribers and send exclusive email campaigns to make them feel special.
4. Present a new platform for subscriber interaction
Using diverse platforms offers new opportunities to reach out to your prospects and customers and engage with them. Let the subscribers know that you are active on social media and ask them to follow you to keep in touch with the latest updates, discount offers, and product launches.
5. Give options to your email subscribers
You should not use email as the only marketing channel. It is quite possible that your subscribers are more active on social media rather than email. Let them choose the platform they are most comfortable using to interact with you.
6. Amplify the potential reach of your message
When you integrate social media into your emails, you improve the reach of your email throughout the different marketing channels.
Having discussed the advantages of social media and email marketing integration, let’s delve deeper into how you can do it right.
How to integrate social media into your email marketing strategy
1. Upload the list of your subscribers to the social networks
By uploading your subscriber list to social networks like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, you can associate a face and name to an email address.
It's a good idea to start following your subscribers on social networks to get a clear idea of their preferences and requirements. Plus, if your social media content is engaging enough, you are sure to attract new followers and get in touch with quality prospects.
2. Invite your social media followers to subscribe to your email list and vice versa
As the newsfeed algorithms keep evolving, it becomes increasingly challenging to reach and engage prospects on social media. Consequently, you might find yourself occasionally losing followers and struggle to reconnect with them later.
It could also happen that your social media business page gets shut down, for example, due to a virus or bug. Even though it doesn't happen very often, you could potentially lose your large, carefully-grown audience in a second. In this scenario, how do you get back in touch with all the people that followed you on social?
To stay on the safe side, you should always invite your social media followers to be your email subscribers.
Not sure how?
Here's an inspiring example from McDonald's:
Encouraging your social media followers to become email subscribers will strengthen your rapport with your social media community - largely because email lets you draft more personalized communication, tailor-made for individual subscribers.
In addition, email has a higher customer lifetime value compared to social media marketing. That's why, if you want to get the best of both worlds, you must consider social media and email marketing integration.
3. Tap into incentive-based referral marketing strategy
Reward-based marketing always works better to engage prospective customers. Persuade your email subscribers to get their friends or family to like your Facebook page and follow you on Twitter or LinkedIn to win exciting incentives and discounts.
4. Include a ‘Retweet This’ tag in your emails
Feature an interesting tweet in your email campaign with a ‘Retweet this’ tag to encourage your subscribers to cross-promote your campaigns.
5. Embed an email sign-up form on Facebook
Facebook gives you the provision of embedding an email sign-up form, so you can get your Facebook fans to be a part of your email list.
6. Add live social media feed in your emails
One of the most effective ways to integrate social media and emails is by adding a live social media feed in your emails. Wondering how? Check out third-party software tools like Zapier that allow you to easily include Twitter and Instagram live feeds in your emails.
Including live Twitter feed in emails allows you to easily find the most recent tweets from a selected Twitter handle.
The feed gets updated automatically when the tweet is posted. For example, if an email is sent on Tuesday evening, the live Twitter feed will fetch the latest tweet posted at that time. That’s why, if a subscriber opens the email on Saturday, he or she will be able to see the latest tweet (as of that day) in the email.
Clicking on the feed will redirect the subscriber to the respective Twitter account, which is a great way to get more organic followers and engagement on your Twitter profile.
Similarly, you can also include live Instagram feed in your email to drive subscribers to your Instagram account.
With Instagram live feed solution, you can enhance the visibility of your Instagram account. It is possible to add a 3x3 or 4x4 picture grid to showcase your recent Instagram posts. As in the case of live Twitter feed, the Instagram feed will also get updated in the email according to the open time of the subscribers.
In this email, Dunkin' cleverly leveraged live social media feeds to direct readers to their social media channels.
7. Build a special social community for the VIP email subscribers
"Fear of Missing Out," or FOMO, is a human instinct that may actually benefit your business. By creating a private social community like a Facebook group, you can tap into the human desire for exclusivity.
How does such a private community work in practice?
Only the subscribers who get their friends to subscribe to your email list have access to the Facebook group.
Another exciting aspect of this idea is that you can build a VIP community with high, meaningful engagement. That's because closed groups tend to have less spam content and more relevant conversations people want to join.
8. Retarget your active email subscribers through social media ads
One of the smartest ways to ensure a multichannel marketing strategy is to match the intent and interest of the prospects with targeted ads.
You can use the information about subscribers who have clicked-through your emails and retarget them through social media ads. In doing so, you're able to specifically reach out to the qualified prospects, which makes your strategy much more cost-effective.
9. Organize social media giveaways to build email list
We all love giveaways and free gifts - and your subscribers are no different. Organizing a contest or giveaway is the perfect method to turn your social media followers into email subscribers.
While running contests, you can ask for the participants' name and email address, as well as their consent to receive promotional emails. Just keep in mind the guidelines stated in GDPR while formulating the contest forms! Otherwise, you'll land yourself in trouble and end up getting fined rather than growing your business.
One idea for a contest is a cross-channel Q&A to bring your email subscribers to social media channels. You can put forth a question in your email and ask the subscribers to post the answers on Twitter or Facebook. The winner can be chosen using a random lucky draw method. This encourages more participants to try their luck and indirectly promote your brand in the digital world.
10. Take help of exclusive email or social media campaigns
If nothing seems to work for your brand, exclusive campaigns can come to your rescue.
In case you do not have enough social media followers, send out emails asking the subscribers to like your page or follow you on Twitter and Instagram.
If, on the other hand, your email list is inadequate, you can create social media posts urging followers to sign up for your emails. You can also use both of these strategies simultaneously to grow your followers and subscribers at the same time.
The takeaway
Using solely email or social media marketing can become self-constraining. That’s why you should leverage social media and email marketing integration in order to optimize your use of both channels. Just make sure you're contextual, responsive, and relevant, so your followers and subscribers enjoy your messaging regardless of the platform you're using.
Do you have any other ideas to integrate social media and emails? Let us know!
About the Author:
Kevin George is the head of marketing at EmailMonks, one of the fastest-growing email design & coding companies. EmailMonks specializes in crafting email newsletter design templates, PSD to HTML email conversion, and free responsive email templates. Kevin loves gadgets, bikes, jazz, and he breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on the Email Marketing blog. Follow him on Twitter @imkevin_monk.
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on socialbakers.com. Any statistics or statements included in this article were current at the time of original publication.
