Many email marketers have been slow off the mark with regards to social media, while others have plunged straight into the deep end without a life jacket.
The key to the successful integration of your email marketing campaigns with social media revolves around two main issues.
Firstly, you need to understand the fundamental differences between these 2 mediums and what this means in terms of marketing potential.
Secondly, you need to use these differences in a way that is constructive to what your long-term objectives are.
You need to understand that balance is essential here, it’s time to start thinking like Goldilocks and making sure your mixture is just right.
The Need For An Integrated Strategy
Integration does not mean you will have to make any radical changes to your message or the way you operate; all it is adding another string to your bow and then going and hunting down some new customers in an exciting new landscape. The search for new market spaces and customers is the very essence of marketing, so embrace it!
Numbers
There are around 3 times as many active email accounts as there are Facebook and Twitter accounts and the amount of emails people receive and read each day is enormous.
For a business-to-business campaign, or a large eCommerce site, social media is an augmentation of an email marketing campaign, not vice-versa.
As Comm100 point out:
Email is still the primary communications tool for work and office related communications. Email is also where people receive their receipts and purchase confirmations for online purchases.
Email is, in other words, a dominant medium for making hard sales.
Audience
Social media and email are also based around different audiences. While email is more ‘business-like’ and potentially transactional in nature (how many b2b companies hammer out contracts with new clients using Facebook?), it is social media’s very lack of these qualities that make it so useful.
Social media can extend the reach of your email campaigns by encouraging more people to sign up to your newsletters or to share your content online.
The heart of an integrated email marketing and social media strategy is the idea that the email marketing part is the foundation upon which all of your social media activity is based.
How To Go About Integrating Email And Social Media?
So how do you go about creating an email marketing campaign that uses social media in a way that leads to real results for your business? It is important to stress that every business will need a slightly different mix, but here are a few essentials to consider:
- You should use social media to create incentives for people to sign up to your emails. You can do this through competitions, giveaways or cool creative content. One thing to remember is to make any giveaway dependent on a number of ‘likes’ being reached before the deal becomes active, otherwise you may not get your money’s worth from the campaign. This also encourages entrants to share the competition with their friends.
- You should create a specialised sign up form for Facebook which allows users to sign up to your emails right there and then. This can be mixed with competitions and giveaways to great effect (advertise on Facebook but make the offer available to subscribers only).
- Include the ability to share the content of your emails via social media by including icons on the message or a ‘share’ or ‘re-tweet this’ button at the bottom.
- Remember to promote your social media activities in your emails so that it doesn’t seem to the consumer that they have been funnelled into an email marketing dead-end
This list is certainly not definitive, but as I mentioned above every company needs to figure out what mix of email and social media is going to work for them. Creativity is the secret sauce of every great marketer!
It is my own personal opinion that email and social media are going to become increasingly intertwined over the next few years, so it will be the smart companies who get the mix just right early on that will do best.
As social APIs become easier and easier to use, the door will open wide to all manner of companies to exploit this (please excuse me for using this word) synergy. The first ones through will be away before you know it.
The later adopters, as always, will be hugely behind, having missed another opportunity they never knew they had.
