Social media marketing has been around for a while now and is a valuable asset to companies. Chances are while you included social media in your marketing efforts you also are running email campaigns as another avenue to reach current and potential clients. While there are many software tools and marketing platforms out there to integrate the two, a lot of marketers still believe that the two marketing practices should be kept separate and not work together.
Nearly half (46 percent) of respondents who use email marketing say their program could benefit from increased focus and optimization.
Combining your social media and your email marketing strategies has many benefits and it’s a lot easier than you think. I have included five ways you can streamline your marketing efforts that tie your email and social media campaigns together and help each other instead of competing with each other.
1. Include social sharing buttons in your emails. Adding Facebook and Twitter sharing icons to your emails encourages people to share your content with their friends and followers, giving you an immediate boost in exposure. Emails that include social sharing buttons have a click-through rate 115% higher than those do not, according to Marketingcharts.com.
2. Place a link on your Facebook page for fans to opt-in to your email campaigns. This will create a quick and easy way to help grow your email list. As you grow your social media presence, your list will also expand with no extra effort on your part. Oh and it’s free!
3. Send an email blast to your subscribers telling them about your Twitter page, promoting your Facebook group or asking them to follow your LinkedIn page. A few sentences announcing the benefits of following you and a call to action button will be all you need. Those that aren’t connected to you already will have the chance to follow you on those networks to keep up with news that they might be missing out on. You are most likely updating your social networks more often than you are sending out an email.
4. Use social media to backup what you’ve said to your subscribers in your emails. You should also have a familiar tone in both. If you make an announcement through an email, offered a piece of content or industry development you should be continuing the conversation through social media. This will allow people to discuss and share their thoughts with you. It also helps build engagement and a feeling of community among your fans. All of these tactics will increase your followers as well as your subscribers.
5. Offer new subscribers the opportunity to follow you on social media when you send them their confirmation email. Even if they unsubscribe from your emails in the future, they may still follow you on social media. This gives you the chance to continue to reach them and hopefully convert them into customers or future employees.
After you start to integrate your social media and email marketing efforts together, you will notice that you can use the information from each to better communicate with your audience. You have data from both why not see what resonates best with both and incorporate that into both strategies? This information will help you better target your audience and will lead to better conversions.
Combining your social media and email marketing will help you market more effectively and bring you more followers and subscribers. It’s very easy to put a few simple strategies into place and start seeing results. Why not start now?
This post originally featured on the Marenated blog. Take a look, you might (will definitely) stumble upon amazingness.
