Integrating your e-mail and social marketing may seem like a novel idea. Many marketing firms mistakenly separate their social media and e-mail marketing campaigns, resulting in a general lack of cohesion between the two. Social media profiles wind up plugging one thing, and e-mails focus on something entirely different. This lack of cohesion winds up splitting your followers and subscribers, and makes each campaign less effective. A much better plan is to instead integrate the two campaigns, while avoiding simply copying the content of your e-mails to social profiles, or vice versa.
1. First, try out some social-media only offers
If you haven’t really had a chance to discover which social sites your subscribers use, it is a good idea to use your subscriber list to do a little research. Send out an e-mail with an offer that can only be redeemed through social media, but incorporate a few different sites. Depending on what response you get, you’ll know where the majority of your subscribers are, and can tailor your e-mails to mesh better with those particular social sites.
2. Write with Social Media in mind
While integrating your social and e-mail marketing campaigns, you’ll probably wind up plugging a few newsletters or other marketing e-mails using social media. Don’t overdo it though – you will have some overlap between your subscribers and your followers. Remember that you also want your subscribers to share through their own profiles, so take the information you found about where your subscribers were the most active, and optimize accordingly. Are a lot of your readers using Twitter? Well, make sure your headline, subject line, and the key points to your message are each below 160 characters so that your readers don’t have to worry about editing anything before plugging your content.
3. Make ‘share’ one of your calls to action
A ‘call to action’ is a word or phrase that is supposed to inspire your subscribers to become actively involved with the e-mail they are reading. It may seem silly, but including the right verbs in the right spots can increase engagement – that’s why so many marketing analysts recommend using calls to action. When you write out your e-mails, ensure that ‘share’ is one of the verbs you use to try and engage the reader.
4. Use visuals and videos
Of course, if you want your subscribers to share your e-mail, or at least elements of it, you need to make the material easily shareable. Very few people are going to copy and paste text from a newsletter to their Facebook feed. Images and videos, though, are a different story, especially if they are funny or interesting. Infographics are especially shareable since they are informative and easy to digest. Experiment with inserting videos and other visual elements into your e-mails, and see if people begin sharing that content.
5. Don’t forget your buttons!
Videos and other visual elements, of course, do not fit with every business or industry. In some cases, your e-mails will be very text heavy, typically plugging articles or other blog posts. Along with linking to the full text of each post, you’ll want to include social media buttons next to each article. Your readers will be much, much more likely to share interesting articles and posts if you make it easy for them to do so.
You cannot get away with just e-mail or just social media marketing anymore – you need to have both to effectively reach your audience. However, in the quest for wider exposure, don’t forget to mesh your campaigns together. Social media and e-mail marketing need to be two sides of the same coin. Both will serve to further your marketing campaign, but each offers its own, distinct advantages. If you make it simple for your readers to share elements of your e-mails, and those elements are actually interesting, your readers will plug your content and, ultimately, drive new people to your site.
