Social media or email marketing – which should you and your business focus on? The answer, much as you may not want to hear it, is both. And then some. There is no one magic answer to marketing success, other than finding the combination of tools, channels, and resources that work best for you. While this may involve some trial and error as you test various email layouts, social media post formatting, timing, and targeting, and narrowing down just who you’re trying to reach, you can gain a lot from simply combining your social media and email marketing strategies, making the most of the wonders of email marketing software. It’s not about choosing, it’s about integrating.
According to a survey published this year, there are over 3.9 billion email users in the world and about 2. Billion social media users worldwide. These are amazing numbers but imagine what you could do with your business growth if you combine both marketing channels to one successful strategy.
Social media is continually evolving, meaning you need to stay on top of the latest trends to make sure you and your business are getting the most from it. With only 56% of marketers using this very simple yet incredibly effective technique, combining your social media presence with some email marketing automation could immediately put you ahead of the game, particularly when you also adopt the latest social media innovations such as:
- Posting Instagram and Facebook stories, instead of sticking to “traditional” status updates. Did you know that 500 million accounts use Instagram stories every single day?
- Making use of automated chatbot responders to give users a quick, interactive response when contacting you via Facebook Messenger or similar
Email marketing software includes plenty of features to help ensure you get the most from these, the fact that around 60% of people list their email as the first media they check each morning, and whatever is round the corner as the next big thing in social media marketing. Wondering where to start?
Here are 5 tips to combining your social media and email marketing strategy:
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Use Social Media Campaigns to Build Your Email List
One of the great benefits of integrating your social media and email marketing strategies is the ease at which you can build your mailing list. Next time you’re planning a social media campaign, share the love with your email. Using email marketing software, you can create a landing page which encourages visitors to sign up for your news, updates, offers, or anything else you have in store for your subscribers. Share this link on your social media accounts, or use the built-in Facebook integration, and you’re well on your way to mastering this.
Here’s a cool ‘Fruit of the Loom’ campaign to steer email subscribers towards their social media accounts:
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Now You Have an Email Subscriber List, Use It for Your PPC Campaigns
Using social media to attract email subscribers is great, but don’t forget that it works the other way round too. Planning some PPC campaigns in the near future? Rather than simply hoping for the best and launching your ads, use those email lists – which you will, of course, have segmented nicely using your email marketing software – to target those at specific stages in the customer journey, those who have shown an interest in a particular product or, basically, however you’ve decided to segment your audience.
It’s a double win for you – you get to target your PPC campaigns accurately, and you don’t need to spend a massive chunk of time setting it all up.
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Run Remarketing Campaigns
Deciding how often to send offers and updates to your email subscribers can be tricky. On one hand, you don’t want to be too sporadic and risk them forgetting about you and buying from a more visible competitor. On the other, you definitely don’t want to be that email marketer who ends up banished to the junk mail folder forevermore after sending one (or ten…) emails too many.
There is a way to tread that safety zone, using email marketing software, and that’s making use of remarketing campaigns. Say, for example, you’re marketing a travel company. Some of your subscribers clicked on an email with an offer for a particular resort, but did not complete the booking. You can use your email marketing software to create a remarketing campaign so these potential customers don’t get bombarded with more emails, but get reminded of the resort and the offer as they browse social media.
Facebook and Twitter both have their own guides to getting started with remarketing, and finding audiences similar to your existing customers – also known as lookalikes.
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Cross Channel Promotions
Even when you implement the best possible integration of your social media and email marketing contacts, you can guarantee that not all of your social media followers will sign up for emails, and not all email subscribers will have followed you on any of your social media platforms. Here’s a great way to reach out to all of them, and grow your audience with minimal effort.
You may already use a corporate email signature, but now it’s time to add to it (or to create one if you don’t use one at all). When you’re sending an email marketing campaign, make sure that you have subscribe buttons for all of your social media included in the signature – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, the lot! A tiny bit of simple text to prompt the click and follow (follow us! is plenty), and you’re off. Don’t forget to add email subscription buttons to your social media homepages too.
One word of warning though – don’t put your social share buttons too close to your subscribe buttons or you risk confusing your audience and missing out on valuable engagement.
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Use Those Buttons!
They’ve been mentioned a few times throughout this blog already but, just to make sure you’re not missing out on an easy win, make use of those social sharing and “follow us” buttons that can be added to any emails you send. Tweak your email template to make sharing an almost automatic response when read and voila! It will take just seconds for your content to be shared to a whole new audience, and hopefully not much longer for you to reap the rewards.
As you can see, there are numerous ways to make your email and social media presences work together for the good of your bottom line. The best option, or combination of options will vary, but it’s generally wise to use a selection to ensure maximum reach. And, to make it all easier, you can enlist the help of some email marketing software to take on the time-consuming tasks, and ensure your marketing campaigns run as smoothly and successfully as possible. Good luck!
Luda Greko is the Head of Content Marketing at ActiveTrail, a leading provider of professional-grade email marketing and automation software for growing businesses. By day she writes for top online marketing sites about email marketing and marketing automation, and by night she is a lifestyle blogger and social media enthusiast.