8 Skillful Ways To Integrate Email Marketing With Social Media

Social media and email marketing share a great chemistry. Although quite effective individually, however, if you combine both, their chemistry can work wonders for your marketing efforts.

Before trying to know the ways you can integrate both, you may ask, does integration really matter? Is it something worth investing your time in? YES, this is one of the techniques you should consider adopting in your marketing strategies.
Here’s why:

• Integration extends your email reach. More are the people sharing your email, the more would be your clicks, opens and conversions.

• It lets you find the key influencer. Most of the ESPs (Email Service Providers) have metrics on people who have shared your emails most frequently, and how their sharing has influenced other key statistics (like conversions, clicks and opens). Using this data, marketers can find out who are their key influencers. If necessary, you can send dedicated email campaigns to the key supporters.

• It offers the chance of list growth. More are the viewers of your email, greater are your chances of getting new subscribers.

• It provides you with one more platform for connecting with your target audience. It is worth noting that every platform, such as a blog, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and email, lets you interact and communicate with your audience in different ways.

• It offers more options to email subscribers. Your email subscribers may prefer communicating and engaging with your brand through several channels. Although email is a great platform, it doesn’t make the only option.

Ways You Can Integrate Email Marketing With Social Media:

1. Put social icons in your emails

Your email campaigns should have the social icons. And don’t merely slap tiny social icons somewhere in the lower portion of the email. Say it out loud. Take the Huffington Post Media Brief as an example:

Image Courtesy: huffingtonpost.com

2. Ask subscribers to share the email and connect
Simply including the social icons in your email is not enough sometimes. Many subscribers recognize icons of LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, but all of them can’t figure out what action they should take on seeing these icons in an email. So, don’t hesitate to tell them. WineAnthology has stated the purpose of social icons very clearly:

Image Courtesy: wineanthology.com

And, if it goes with your brand or company image, you may incorporate a little bit of humor. See how BustedTees has some fun here:

Image Courtesy: www.bustedtees.com

3. Create dedicated email campaign

Sometimes, putting a few buttons or links asking the subscribers to share or connect socially, doesn’t work well. If this technique is not working for you, consider creating an email dedicated to a specific social network. Copyblogger has used this strategy in the following way:

Image Courtesy: www.copyblogger.com

4. Get subscribers through social networks

If your company has a strong following in a certain social network, feel free to request for new subscribers of your email through that network. Watch how C.C. Chapman employs this technique in his tweet:

Image Courtesy: twitter.com

You can even go for promoting your website’s email newsletter sign-up page in Facebook.

5. Add “Retweet This!” in your email

An effective way to blend social media with email marketing is highlighting a certain tweet in the email. MarketingProfs has applied this in its emails. The technique of displaying a specific tweet in the email goes well with the mantra of “share your community’s stuff”.

Image Courtesy: www.marketingprofs.com

6. Promote email marketing through blog
This is an often-ignored integration technique. Well, you can use your blog for getting new email subscribers. See the way Chris Brogan employs his blog for the job:

Image Courtesy: chrisbrogan.com

7. Use re-targeting ads for visitors clicking your emails, on Twitter and Facebook

This is a powerful trick, but most marketers don’t take its advantage. Running ads blindly would only increase your expenditure. However, to make money, you need to match interest and intent using targeted ads.

How does re-targeting work?

To use re-targeting, a tracking code needs to be installed in your website. This would enable your ad platform to use cookies for your visitors, and then display ads for them on other platforms (say Facebook).

If you have crafted an email campaign targeted to your subscribers, re-target only those subscribers who have clicked through. Social networks make effective platforms for running your ads, as social sites get heavy traffic and running ads on them is quite affordable.

8. Create a social group for subscribers

This one is a highly underrated method. Noah Kagan employed this tactic for creating a Facebook group of 5000+ members.

He did it by firstly creating an email course named “Email1k”. A few smart people contributed the lessons in the course, and he offered the content for free to people signing up. When an individual signs up for the email course, he/she is requested to email two friends about the course. In case the person emails two friends, he/she can join the private group in Facebook.

Creating an engaged and active group forms the base of making such a strategy work well. In the Email1k group, the content is kept useful and informative. There is no self-promotion or spam. The strategy has worked for them. The posts often receive 20 comments, and sometimes they get 50 comments or more.

Image Courtesy: bufferapp.com

So, use the email–social chemistry to your advantage. You would be amazed to see how effectively email marketing powers social media and email marketing is powered by social media. Are there any other creative ways of integrating the two platforms? If yes, please share through your comments.