Email and social media are vital to your marketing strategy – so use the following tips to bind them together.
Offering different channels for your prospects to engage with your brand is vital in this multi-channel era. More importantly, it is essential to offer a unified experience whether the choice of engagement is via social media or email.
Integrating email and social media marketing needs to be one of your top priorities in 2014.
Ensure email and social media integrate seamlessly by offering consumers a consistent brand across all your marketing platforms:
- Ensure visual consistency and excellence across all channels, so each forms a unified, appealing experience for the visitor.
- Create engaging, original content whatever the channel – without it, customers won’t come back. Why would they?
- Segment your target audiences and your messages to each channel. For instance, each channel requires its own style of content and “voice” – Facebook is more informal, while LinkedIn is more businesslike. A simple differentiation, yes, but a vital one.
1. Make sharing a cinch. Give readers the option to share your email content via social media links in the email so they can recommend your content in an instant. You can also give them the option to go directly to your social media main pages from your email. Of course, your prospects can also share via email – give them the option to ‘forward to a friend’.
2. Don’t look like an overachiever. Don’t suffocate the reader with social media options in your emails. Create a database of different client types to target in different, but more effective, ways. For example, a LinkedIn button is more appropriate to a B2B client than a Facebook button.
3. Add comments made by your social media subscribers to your emails and promote this crossover – it offers them the ideal vehicle to interact with your brand.
4. Connected content. Blend content from your social media into your emails. For example, by offering a selection of the latest tweets or Facebook postings with links to take the reader to the relevant social media area, you can encourage them to opt-in to your social media channels. You can also allow users to comment on Facebook postings or Tweets from links inside emails.
5. Offer a social media connection option on your email unsubscribe page – the unsubscriber may still want to stay in touch but not via that particular channel.
6. Click bait. When running promotions, free guides, competitions or surveys via social media, request that email subscribers verify their entry/download, plus offer an opt-in for receiving regular email newsletters and updates.
7. Monitor what’s popular on your social media channels. This can offer insights into what to focus on in your next email.
8. Lazy bones. Don’t simply cut and paste headers and content from your emails into your social media feed. This looks lazy and unfocused. Be dynamic and embrace the strengths of each channel.
9. “And here is the news… ” Promote your emails/newsletters on your social media platforms – but find innovative ways to do it that are suited to the particular channel. For instance, marketer Chris Brogan uses an effective, personable video-based shoutout on his Google+ page that promotes his highly-subscribed email list.
10. Promote your emails and their content across all your social media channels. Encourage people to make the crossover and embrace both channels.
Remember:
- Be sure to target your messaging, whatever the channel.
- Offer readers the ability to interact with you and share your content easily.
- Integrating email and social media marketing is vital to ensuring consistency across the two channels.
- Each can inform the other in terms of content, information gathering and branding, creating a symbiotic, co-nurturing relationship.
