Social Marketing and Email Integration
Why Integrate Social Marketing and Email?
Many business owners, managers, and marketing mavens fail to utilize the many benefits of combining marketing strategies. Social Media or Social Marketing and Email Marketing are significant marketing channels that compliment each other and provide a great source of analytics and feedback. Both channels allow the opportunity to stay in touch with the customers and provide future leads at the same time.
Social share buttons or badges are a wonderful way to spread the word of a brand or product. Lead generation should always be at the top of the funnel. Email marketing provides a great opportunity to embed or include share links to social sites like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Don’t forget to provide something of value at the end of the trail. When people find your social page interesting and find valuable information or offer they are 4x more likely to share your page with their friends and associates.
Remember how and why you obtained a person’s email address. It’s good to know where the email address came from. Was it from Social Media, a lead nurturing campaign, maybe from an interesting blog post? It’s always a good idea to separate an email list into groups of top-of-funnel acquisition channels. Make sure each email campaign targets the likes and interests of the email owner and has relevant information available on the social sharing site they are likely to visit.
When posting to social media sites, make sure the content includes a mixture of text and images and contains useful and interesting information that will play well to both existing customers and your lead generation funnels. This is especially true when sending emails. Take a look at the first five posts in all of your social media sites. Do they correspond to the theme of the pending email?
One of the worst mistakes made when sending emails and posting to social media is the failure to include appropriate calls-to-action and a sound lead generation funnel. Every email should, at a minimum, contain a link to a social media page or website page that provides additional information related to the email theme. If directed to a page, the page should include a share and like buttons for your social media pages. If directed to a social media page, the page should include links to a web site page. Both pages should include additional calls-to-action and a secondary step in a lead generation and conversion funnels. Don’t forget, every touch point is an opportunity to gather an email address or gain a share or like for social media.
Implementing and compounding Email and Social Media campaigns provides a fluid and flexible avenue for cross-linking and cross-pollination. Topping off the opportunity is the ability to design in metrics that can be tracked and used to hone the message for both channels into a finely tuned conversion and lead generation machine. A side benefit is the data acquired that can be used to enhance the success of future emails, website additions and modifications, and perhaps the addition of additional products and services.
