The First Steps to Integrating Social Media into Your Email Marketing
As social media becomes increasingly popular as an effective marketing medium, it continues to intertwine with email marketing due to the cross-promotional opportunities between the two areas.
According to a recent survey by StrongMail, 51 percent of companies were planning to bump up their marketing spend for 2012 with the top two targets being email and social media. Forty-one percent of marketers will maintain 2011 spending levels but focus on those growing areas, as well as mobile.
The survey also noted that, “more than two-thirds of businesses plan to integrate social media and email in 2012, versus 44 percent integrating mobile and email. The strong ties between email marketing and social media are also emphasized by the 47 percent of businesses that plan to increase investment in using email to drive growth in their social media channels, such as corporate Facebook and Twitter pages.”
These numbers are great but how do you get optimize your email marketing for social media and vice versa?
Integrating Social Media Into Email Marketing
1. Share! Make your emails easy-to-share across all social media platforms. Include buttons like “Tweet this,” “Pin It!,” “Share on Facebook,” and more. According to a MarketingSherpa survey, including social media “share” features boosted interaction by 25 percent. Good – and unique – content gets shared, allowing you to reach a broader audience and increase opens, clicks, and conversions. Check out Mashable’s share bar. The counters allow you to see how many people are spreading your message and back-end tracking will show you who your key influences are too. A bar like this is easily incorporated into your email, whether you choose to include it in your header, or prefer a side “share” like below.
2. Dedicate an email. Send an email out to your database asking them to like you on Facebook, follow you on Twitter, and subscribe to your YouTube feed, for new and exciting information from your company.
3. Incentives! What’s in it for them? Give people a reason to join you on your social media sites. Retailers do a great job at this by offering discounts and special offers for friends or fans.
4. Followers can become subscribers. Let your social network know about your email program or e-newsletter and how you can subscribe. Great blog post? Share it on Facebook and include “subscribe to our blog feed to get fresh content like this delivered straight to your inbox!”
5. Blog all about it! Do not be shy in your blog to point to your email subscription. For example, reference a line or subject from a recent email and link to it, “in a recent email, we tackled the subject of xxx.”
These are just a few of the ways that you can incorporate email into your social media and social media into your email. While both email and social media can be effective on their own, together they become a powerhouse that gives you more reach and helps expand your audience and your conversions.
How are you incorporating social media into your email campaigns? Is it working?
Tagged in: Facebook, Mashable, Timberline Interactive