Want to give your online marketing a boost? Try combining your social media marketing with your email marketing. Here’s how to do it.
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You’ve heard the benefits of both email and social media touted by marketing experts—the truth is, these channels are most effective when combined. Email marketing and social media marketing have reshaped the marketing landscape for small businesses. Today there are more opportunities than ever before to grow and extend your message to reach new customers. But as valuable as these tools are individually, the results that come from using them separately barely scratch the surface of what they offer when used together.
Social media and email fit together as a marketing strategy perfectly. By building an engaged audience on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Pinterest, you have the opportunity to extend your business’ message beyond the inbox. By encouraging people who already read your emails each month to connect and engage with you on social media, you’ll have more opportunities to generate social visibility for your business.
Here are some ways you can combine email and social for maximum marketing potential:
Share your newsletter on social media
Have a great newsletter? Link to it on Facebook and Twitter. Social followers who aren’t subscribers will be incentivized to join your list, and those who already subscribe will get an extra reminder to check out your latest news. If you are on Pinterest, pin a key image from your newsletter and link it back to the email content—this is also great for SEO. Encourage subscribers to share your newsletters, too. You want more readers who are like your current readers, so tap into their networks by asking them to share your newsletter.
Include social media engagement
Link to your social profiles in your newsletters. Be sure to tell people why they should follow you. Is it for articles, quotes, discounts, jokes, or something else? They will want to know. If you want to encourage newsletter subscribers to connect with you on social media, try taking screen shots of good engagement that you’ve had on social media channels (like Twitter and Facebook) to include them in your newsletter. This works particularly well if you pair it with a call to action, as call to action success rates are greatly increased if you pair them with a testimonial.
Encourage fans and followers to become subscribers
If people come to your social media sites and they are interested in what you do, you can encourage them to sign up on your email lists. The one flaw of social media is that on sites like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, you’re really just renting space. Unlike email, where you can create and send a message and know it’s been delivered, with many of these social media sites, your control is extremely limited. That’s why it’s so important to turn social connections into email contacts. By giving your social connections the opportunity to take the next step and sign up to have content delivered straight to their inbox, you’ll be able to extend those relationships and have more control over how you communicate with them online.
Encourage discussion
With email, it’s not always easy to encourage feedback or to spark an ongoing conversation among readers. But by encouraging readers to share their thoughts or questions about a specific email topic on Facebook or Twitter, you give people a compelling reason to connect with you on social media and generate more attention for your email as well. These kinds of strong social calls to action will provide a link between the two channels. Just be sure you monitor the discussion so you can reply and keep it going.
