Social media is largely a top-of-funnel marketing platform while email takes over once leads have been generated, serving as a middle-of-funnel marketing tool. While used for distinctly different purposes, they can be allies and improve each other.
Use email to promote your social media pages and increase social shares. This is an easy one : add social media buttons or links to every email you send to subscribers. Email marketing is still very effective and can help you increase visibility for your posts.
Leverage social to build your subscribers list. There are several ways to go about this. Twitter Lead Generation Cards are a popular option to collect information on customers. You can also use them to promote a piece of content or offer exclusive access to content, such as a whitepaper or ebook. Check out more Twitter marketing tips here.
Four Effective Ways to Make Social Media and Email Work Together
1. Use Contests and Gamification
Competitions and games are easy lures, attracting engagement easily and supporting social sharing goals.
- Add a gamification element to create excitement around an upcoming event or blowout sale. For instance, you can play ‘guess where’ (the location of the event) or ‘guess what’ (eg : which Apple product are we selling at a 50% discount on Black Friday?) to spark participation. Announce that you will reveal the location or product after receiving x number of tweets or email forwards. It is sure to encourage shares and keep people hanging around for the big reveal.
- While discount coupons and special offers are largely reserved for social media, there is no reason why your subscribers cannot share them directly from their email. Add share-with-your-network (SWYN) links in your email content to allow subscribers to share the content or just the promotional offer on their Twitter or Facebook page with a single click.
LinkedIn is a key content marketing platform and a meeting hub for professionals. Its very nature and purpose makes it a goldmine for growing your subscriber list. It can be as easy as adding a link to your LinkedIn company page that directs readers to your website or a link to a gated offer within a short post that enables readers to access a report or ebook. Highlight the offer prominently; one tactic is to position it in the middle of the post so it is clearly visible to readers.
For this strategy to pay big dividends, you need an authoritative LinkedIn page. Consider these tips:
- Complete your profile to make your page more visible over partially completed competitor profiles.
- Manage your LinkedIn presence, ensuring that you share at least 3-4 posts a week.
- Respond to comments on your LinkedIn posts; this is yet another way of demonstrating your expertise and humanizing your brand.
- Avoid focusing only on prospects and ignoring current clients or business partners. The goal should be to present yourself as an influential member of your niche, and that means also reaching out to stakeholders and community members.
- Target updates to specific prospects segmented by industry, location and other demographic parameters.
- Designate a few employees to create useful, authority-building posts on the network. This will not only position your brand attractively before your community but also further their personal brand.
Managing multiple social networks is hard work. A social media account management tool can be invaluable in helping you multi-task and save time to dedicate to content and campaign creation.
3. Upload Your Email List to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter
An easy strategy to integrate your email and social media marketing efforts is to simply upload your subscriber list to your social networks. You can immediately start following your subscribers on social media, understanding them better, building out deeper profiles and developing targeted campaigns that lead them down the funnel.
For instance, you can leverage Facebook’s Custom Audience feature to refine ad targeting. There are three types of custom audiences : customer list, website traffic and app activity. Within each group, you can target smaller segments for better optimized ads. Some of the popular uses of Custom Audience you can explore include:
- Growing your Facebook community by collecting leads or retargeting subscribers
- Targeting individuals who have abandoned their cart
- Upselling to existing customers
- Soliciting feedback from current customers
- Engaging active subscribers
Finally, you can also target people who have left your website to acquire more email subscribers.
One of the lesser known benefits of merging some aspects of your email and social media activities is preventing unengaged subscribers to desert your brand. Though some prospects may subscribe to your newsletters, they may not actually open your emails or take up any of your promotional offers. After monitoring click-through rates, monitoring subscribers’ behaviors, and targeting them with alternate or new offers or email subject lines, you will still find a few who’re most likely to unsubscribe in the future.
Maybe they would be more comfortable engaging with your Facebook or Twitter page? An email proposing that perhaps they can interact with one of your social media pages can earn you a fan or follower instead.
Draw out a plan with your team and set metrics and goals around what you expect the integration to achieve. This will be especially helpful if you have two separate teams each handling email or social media marketing.
