Complement your email marketing campaign with social media elements for maximum impact.
Email marketing has been the backbone of many inbound marketing campaigns – strong and reliable but never fully appreciated until it fails. That said, when it comes to smart marketing, email isn’t everything. Since social media has taken over as an avenue for reaching segmented audiences, it’s important to utilize email and social media marketing together to increase consumer conversion rates through both channels.
Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or other social media outlets, finding ways to work your social presence into email marketing campaigns can be a game changer.
Email Marketing Musts
Unfortunately, there are as many stubbornly ineffective email marketing campaigns as there are successful strategies creating conversions. You’ve likely seen or received regularly scheduled emails that fail to appeal to you as a consumer while still bombarding your inbox. To avoid becoming junk mail to consumers, keep the following in mind as you craft your email marketing campaigns:
- Schedule but adapt: Creating a monthly/yearly email release calendar is email marketing 101, but it’s also an easy way to fall into an uninspired routine. Schedule emails regularly but leave room for innovative testing opportunities to sharpen campaign messages and further segment audiences.
- Audience segmentation: Segmenting your audience is the best way to drive products and services to the most receptive consumers. It’s also a great way to adapt your send schedule (as discussed above) and tailor different email marketing content to different audiences.
- Mobile optimization: Straight to the point, if your emails aren’t designed to properly display on mobile devices, you have a problem. Mobile optimization is a must.
- Create valuable content: The content used in your email marketing is what drives consumer conversions. Strong subject lines, practical-yet-valuable filler, and effective calls to action set successful inbound marketing campaigns apart from those that get tossed into the junk folder.
Books have been written and seminars given about inbound marketing centered around email strategy. There’s no shortage of information to help sharpen yours, but these email marketing musts can help get you started.
Ways to Utilize Social Media in Email Marketing Campaigns
Bridging the gap between email and social media marketing takes a combination of tried-and-true email marketing tactics and a certain level of social awareness. The social media landscape is often unforgiving, and consumers today are wise to companies that try to use deceptive tactics or misguided attempts to interact with a prospective audience.
As with inbound marketing, social media engagement through email benefits from a foundation of beginner recommendations, but it’s important to know who your audience is and adapt accordingly. Inbound marketing has never been one-size-fits-all, but here are a few pointers to help complement your email campaigns with social media elements:
- Sharing icons: They’re everywhere, and they come in a variety of customized shapes, colors, and sizes. Strategically designing social media sharing icons into your content is the first step in cross-promoting social media through email marketing. Sharing icons let consumers know your business has a social presence through any number of social media services (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, etc.).
- Sharing rewards: Consumers love rewards, and offering discounts or deals through email campaigns that specifically target social media interaction can benefit both marketing channels. You’d be surprised how effective “like our Facebook page for X reward” can be for a cross-promotional campaign.
- Exclusivity: In line with sharing rewards, offering a sense of social media/email exclusivity has an interesting effect on consumers. People enjoy the idea of preferential treatment that’s implied by being part of an exclusive club, and smart marketers take advantage of content in email and social media campaigns to create that sense of exclusivity. Personal yet professional is what you’re striving for.
Test and Tinker for Best Results
Social media marketing services come in a variety of flavors, and it’s your job to move your marketing campaigns and strategies in line with consumers who call these sites home. There’s no better way to narrow your marketing message to widen the conversion net than to determine what works and what doesn’t, so it’s important to test, tinker, and try again. Always. When it comes to mixing social media into your email marketing, just remember there’s more than one way to succeed.
