Social media and email are two efficient yet very distinct methods of digital marketing. While social media is more for engaging and interacting with your audience and delivering value to them, email is used for more actionable objectives. These two work quite differently in the way they cater to any business’s audience.
Your audience on social media can have public conversations in a forum, present their opinions, and share other relevant content. Social media discussions are timely and interactive, but they are also fleeting, which means current posts quickly flow downstream as other people make new posts.
Email, on the other hand, provides space for more private and intimate discussions between a business and its customer. It may not have the fluidity and interactiveness of social media, but it has more permanence. When a customer opens your email, you have their full attention for the moment they are reading your email, and they can easily find and revisit the email in their inbox at any time in the future.
There are about 3.9 billion email users and 3.5 billion social media users on the planet. This reality gives every business a huge opportunity to reach out to their customers by putting together the power of these two marketing strategies. Here are seven tactics you can use to make social media and email work as one for your overall digital marketing strategy.
Bring your email subscribers into your social networks
Practically speaking, your email list and your social media audience cannot accurately mirror each other. However, having a healthy amount of overlap across both platforms is an excellent thing for your marketing needs.
To achieve this, send an email to your list inviting them to follow you and your business on Twitter, or join your page on Facebook. You may have to incentivize them via exclusive deals and promotions to get them moving. Most major social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ have a feature to help you upload your email list to your social networks. This tactic helps you to put a name and a face to the emails and to gain better insight into their pain points and needs.
Adapt your social content for your newsletter and vice versa
Those on your email list are probably already used to reading your email newsletters, but you can repurpose them for your social media interaction. You can pull a single tip, or a unique idea from any of your newsletters and use these snippets of valuable information to kickstart discussions on your Twitter or Facebook page.
Alternatively, you can drop a teaser to value articles, blogs, and newsletters archived on your website, and then link back to this archive on social media. With this ‘microcontent’ strategy, you can produce a consistent stream of social media content that maintains a bridge between your email list, social media, and your website.
Use social media ads for retargeting email click-throughs
While social media ads are a great tool to target the right people for your business according to their interests, focusing on a re-targeting ad campaign is a lot more efficient and is cheaper. It is the best way to find potential customers who meet the criteria of both interest and intent.
With tracking tools – like Facebook Pixel, for instance – you can collect the data of people who have visited your website and show your ads to only that group of people when they are on other websites or any social media platform.
You can do the same with your email list. Using your CRM tool, you can curate a list of only those who clicked through on your emails and focus your ad targeting on them alone. Retargeting helps you eliminate the guesswork to a large extent because you are showing your ads only to people who have shown interest in your brand, product, or service.
Leverage email outreach to boost your social shares and reputation
Why do you think people visit big business review websites like TripAdvisor, YellowPages, and even the relatively smaller essay writing service review solutions like Best Writers Online? It’s because they want to know that a business/service they wish to subscribe to has enough social proof to qualify them as an option.
This is true when you are aiming to solidify your business’s spot as an industry giant and thought leader. To attain this sort of social proof and reputation, you will usually need to have the direct or indirect endorsement of other thought leaders, influencers, and industry professionals on some of your top value content.
However, these people will not give attention to your content if it does not already have some good miles on it — in terms of shares and engagement. To get the ball rolling on this, you should leverage your already existing email list. Create an email marketing campaign asking and incentivizing your subscribers to share your content on their social media platforms. If you have a sizable email list, these shares add up quickly.
Once you have gained a few hundred shares, you can then reach out to larger publications and industry bigwigs, because now they’ll be able to see that many people already resonate with your content. They’ll be more willing to put their name behind a brand that already has a vast and verifiable social perception and backing.
Send emails via your social networks
Social media’s features seem boundless in their effectiveness; you can use social media to send emails to members of your social media audience, even if they are not on your email list. This indirect method of email marketing can help you to sneak into a person’s inbox ethically.
LinkedIn, for instance, has a ‘send email notification’ feature that is active by default. If your business owns a LinkedIn group, you can easily use this feature to regularly send notifications every week to members of your group without ever having to go to your email marketing tool.
This tactic works best if you run a robust community that focuses on delivering value and helping people in the group. This way, the emails won’t come as a surprise to the recipients, and they will come with the group name under the “from” field. Just make sure the emails are excellent to read, and you should see remarkable results.
Add social media icon in your emails
This tactic creates a bridge between your email list and social media presence. The effectiveness of this strategy shows in the fact that 76% of emails sent every day contain social media icons. Because the content structure and intent are different on social media and email, you want your subscribers to have access to both. Including social media icons in your emails is an excellent and efficient way to get them to your social networks.
These kinds of emails have remarkably higher click-through-rates than emails without them. For optimal effect, insert the icons at the beginning of the email, instead of at the bottom. This way, you are sure that the email recipient will see it even if he/she decides to go ahead with the email or not.
Final Words
Social media and email are a deadly digital marketing combination, not to mention the most lucrative marketing mix in today’s business world. While email will help you develop a personal correspondence with your audience, social media is a massive platform for robust data collection. Using them together can only spell greater heights for your business.
Author – Aaron Swain
Aaron Swain – Writing specialist. Aaron is passionate about marketing and SEO. He expands and improves his skills throughout the writing process to help and inspire people.
- Further reading: https://powersellingmom.com/5-email-marketing-ideas-to-promote-sales/
- https://powersellingmom.com/11-golden-rules-that-help-create-content-for-social-media-marketing/
- https://powersellingmom.com/5-simple-ways-to-improve-email-subject-line/
