With the overwhelming prevalence of social media, you might be wondering how useful your integrating email marketing campaigns are. Well, you’d be surprised at how effective email campaigns remain. Email
is incredibly cost-effective, with $38 returned for every $1 spent.
Related post: Visual Content … 13 Remarkable Marketing Examples to Study
Email is a great way of getting interested clients started in your sales funnel. Successful brands have learned to integrate their email marketing with their social media platforms. It creates a consistent experience for the customer and facilitates communication between your teams.
Start with an assessment
Begin by meeting with your team and doing an assessment. Discuss questions such as what social media goals can be met using email, what kind of integration is already happening, what resonates on social media that doesn’t on email, and vice versa.
The answers to these questions show you where your actual starting point is, and what directions you need to be going in. Create a plan for integrating email marketing into your existing social media strategy.
This assessment is necessary because you might need to do more work or less work than you think. See what the big companies are doing right now and how they are integrating social media with email – you might be doing some of those things, but you might not be as well. It’s impossible to start planning without first understanding your situation.
After you do thorough research and study what this integration is and what it will mean for your business, only then you can start. This is because some of the integration techniques might already be used in your company and you need to know which and the effects that they cause to properly measure the methods that you are going to start using.
Include social share icons in your emails
This one is pretty obvious, and you might already be doing it. But just in case you’re not, include social share icons to the emails you send out to your subscriber list. It’s important that you make them prominent and obvious, right at the beginning of the email, where the reader will see it.
There’s not much point in including icons if they’re small and tucked away at the bottom. Just create an HTML webpage version of your email content, and then create custom code. Because some email providers don’t display images, be sure to include an alt-text. While we’re talking about emails, make sure you use tools like My Writing Way and Assignment help to write accurate emails.
Social media icons are important because people often like to see the brand in a more crowded situation – email is isolated but social media is live, and there is so much information on your company there.
Users can engage with you there on a personal basis, look at how you address the public and how the public responds. Sharing something from your email, users show that they care and you can respond and further empower your relationship with them.
Calendars
Scheduling calendars are an effective marketing tool. Does your email marketing calendar include your social media posting? Maybe your social media team is already using one that you’re not aware of? The reason for bringing this up is that sometimes teams end up doing the same task twice because they don’t know that someone is already working on it. Integrate your social media and email marketing calendars, and you’ll likely find you save your teams sometimes. You’ll also lessen the chance that something gets missed because someone thinks the other team is doing it.
Project management tools like Asana and Trello, editorial calendars like CoSchedule, and Google Calendar are all good options for integration.
A calendar will help you stay organized. Social media sometimes seems as if it shouldn’t be scheduled because there are so many opportunities for posting when certain important events happen suddenly or when there is a new trend that you can piggyback on.
However, these situations only come once in a while, and you should schedule everything else. Schedule your posts for holidays, reposting of your blog posts, news about your brand, updates, contests, etc.
All of this should be meticulously planned for every platform – you can schedule your posts on a weekly or a monthly basis, leaving some space for unexpected events.
Create an exclusive community
People like being the member of an exclusive group. Offer membership to an exclusive social media community where people can sign up for a free course in exchange for emailing two friends about the course. You’ll want to create some useful content to give people a reason to join and stay in the group.
These communities are a great way to boost user engagement and also update your fans about new offers and options. Catchy titles are a big reason why people choose to read things, so get help generating catchy social media titles with resources like Academized and Paper Fellows.
Contests on social media pages also play a big role in this. If you often host competitions and giveaways, you can not only boost your stats on social media, but you can also improve how the public feels about you.
People love these contests, and they enjoy entering them because they are so simple and the rewards are valuable. You can create numerous different sets of rules and rewards – some of them can even include signing up for your newsletter or sharing a bit from your email content.
Another thing that you could do is provide a reward for all of your email subscribers – like a free cookbook or a free course – and let people know about it on social media.
Incentives
You’re always going to get a better response when you provide an incentive; it’s just part of human nature. Give your followers an incentive to hop on your email list. Sometimes an incentive means giving out a discount or a coupon, but it doesn’t always have to be financial.
You can try offering subscribers a chance to be featured in your next email newsletter. People like being “internet famous,” after all. As previously stated, rewards like free e-books or courses for new subscribers are a great idea because it entices people to subscribe to your email newsletter. But this is where the opportunities only begin.
“You can, for instance, create a discount reward for everyone who shares your email on all stated social media platforms or you could create contests on social media that include your emails – people love competing and getting rewards.
This is a great opportunity for you to boost engagement and thus, your relationship with your users. Whatever you choose, remember that people don’t usually do something for nothing. Give them a reason”, – explains David Knudtson, a Social Media manager at Writing Populist and Simple Grad.
Invite your followers to join your email list
Have you ever tried promoting your email list on your social media accounts? Twitter cards are a great way to try this out. Twitter cards allow users to subscribe to an email list without leaving the platform.
That makes people a lot more likely to go for it since people are often hesitant to hop off that Twitter feed. Check out resources like Australian Help and Via Writing for help creating engaging social media posts to encourage followers to subscribe.
Your social media followers might not even know that there is an email list – make sure that they know about it. But don’t just promote the list, promote what they get by it.
Maybe you offer free tips in your email series, and those tips can be useful to someone, or you have discounts or coupons in your email marketing campaign once a month, or you offer free e-books – no matter what it is, you should start with that.
People are not going to subscribe just because you ask them to – make them want it. This is a great way to boost your email list by also boosting your social media. Make it flow seamlessly.
8 Things Steve Jobs Would Know About Your Social Media Engagement
Dedicated campaigns
If you find your other strategies aren’t working, maybe it’s time for a dedicated campaign. Try sending out an email message dedicated to asking your subscribers to follow you on a specific social media platform.
Give them some reasons why they’ll enjoy your social media updates, and show them how to follow you, just in case that’s the only barrier.
“This can work both ways – as stated in the previous tip; you can ask your followers on social media to subscribe to your email list and offer rewards for that. You can also create dedicated email campaigns where you will ask your audience to follow you on social media.
Again, make them want it because people are often reluctant to do this or they are too lazy. Good rewards are enticing. They don’t have to be too expensive at all, but they will boost your chances both ways”, – says Richard Sherman, a Digital Strategist at Boomessays and Oxessays.
The bottom line
There doesn’t need to be an email versus social media marketing debate; the best way is an integrated approach. Integrating the two creates a better, seamless experience for the user, and that’s good for your conversions.
You can use your email to grow your social media, and your social media to grow your email list. Use these seven tips and tricks to integrate email marketing into your social media.
Freddie Tubbs is an email marketing analyst at Australian Reviewer. He is running UKServicesReviews blog and contributes guides and case studies to Assignment writing service.