Posted by It’s easy to find digital marketers who use either social media or email as their preferred marketing channel. What is difficult is to find marketers who are using both mediums in tandem.
It’s widely accepted that omnichannel marketing is the way to go forward, yet only a few marketers are leveraging both social media and email to reach KPIs faster. 3.96 billion people are using social media today — that’s a massive number you’re ignoring by only focussing on email marketing. Similarly, if you’re running a social media marketing campaign, you can’t overlook the fact that 59% of consumers decide what to buy based on daily emails.
In this article, we are going to talk about the ways marketers can successfully integrate social media and email for a multidimensional marketing strategy that promises high ROI.
But before we get into how it’s important to learn the why.
Social media vs. Email marketing: A marketer’s heaven
While social media is about casting a wide net, email is focused on personalized communication with each customer. Both work great in their respective ways, but it’s only when you integrate social media in email marketing will you be able to create a competitive edge in your segment.
Elevate campaign metrics
Marketers always look to improve the customer journey and reduce churn. For this, a unified experience plays a major role. By integrating your social media management with your email marketing service, you can target and retarget customers with seamless ads and notifications across channels, improve cart abandonment rate, and boost conversions.
Add qualified subscribers to your email list
Instead of simply running ads or using lead magnets on search engines, you can use the followers you’ve already gathered on your socials. These are the people who have shown interest in your brand so they’ve already passed the awareness stage. It’s far more effective and easier to now push them to the next stages with a series of emails.
However, you cannot simply send email blasts to followers. Email addresses need to be verified to make sure they’re authentic and active. Far too many marketers ignore this step and end up with a high bounce rate, and low deliverability score.
Offer customers more flexibility
This is again related to managing customer expectations and improving the omnichannel experience. A group of social media followers might prefer to interact with your brand in some other way and email gives them that option. Similarly, email subscribers may want to follow you on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or some other social channels. It’s important to give them the flexibility to decide how and where they want to interact with you. Aura welcomes its customers to social with a beautiful email. It has a perfect copy, great visuals and it ends with proper CTA to “Stay in the know” and follow them on social media.
Another benefit of integrating both social media and email is the ability to provide faster and richer solutions to customer queries. Brands are able to answer questions on social media far more quickly than emails and consumers are enjoying the shift.
Gain control of your audience
While the other benefits are focused on improving how you treat customers and audiences, this one stems out of necessity.
Brands don’t own their follower count no matter how many hours they put into creating a thriving community. If something happens to the account, you can lose the entire community in seconds. Email, on the other hand, is a far more vetted process — it’s a list that you can control on a granular level. So instead of putting all the proverbial eggs in one basket, you should diversify the channels.
Now that you’re aware of the benefits the integration brings, it’s time to learn how you can do that.
Ways to Integrate Social Media Into Your Email Marketing Strategy
Here are 5 creative ways you can bring social media and email together to achieve a higher conversion.
1. Encourage cross-channel interaction
You need to encourage email subscribers to follow your social media pages and vice versa.
In email copy, add social buttons that are easily accessible and ask subscribers to follow you. You can dedicate a newsletter promoting social media profiles and share how it’s important to continue the conversation on different platforms. Use attractive graphics and try adding your follower count to create peer pressure. For new customers, use the welcome series to drum up your social media presence. Welcome emails have an open rate of 30.69% since new customers are highly interested in these emails. You can try the same technique for post-purchase emails as well. You can also use an email signature with social icons to follow. This is a common and natural way to provide quick access to your most active social profiles.
The other side of the picture is all about bringing social followers to your email list. You should include a signup button to lead viewers to a landing page where they share their emails with you. This is something Trello has been doing successfully to onboard new customers and build email lists.
Apart from this, Facebook has a feature that allows you to create newsletter forms and embed them on the page. But Facebook is not the only social media giant that has realized the potential of newsletters. LinkedIn and recently Twitter has started allowing in-app newsletters to help brands and creators build a unified audience without platform segmentation.
2. Add social media feeds to your emails
Adding live social media feeds is a clever way to make people follow those channels. Social media feeds work because:
- People love visual content
- Live feed creates very little friction and encourages people to quickly jump into the conversations
- Prospects can check user-generated content (UGC) from previous buyers and make purchase decisions
- Brands can create unique hashtags that users can follow via email, which creates a sense of close-knit community
Live feed is ideal for Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest updates. You can send a daily or weekly email digest with a live feed for people to stay in the loop. This not only improves social media engagement but also builds brand loyalty. Here’s Marks & Spencer using the live Instagram feed to great effect:
3. Create a private group on social media
You must have a set of customers that fit the interests of your ideal customer profile (ICP), customers that frequently buy from you, or bring new business via referrals. You’ll also have a few super-engaged followers who interact with your posts. Why not bring all of them together in a unique group?
Private Facebook groups allow you to create and maintain high-quality interactions with customers. You can beta test features, collect feedback and gain insights into what type of content or services they expect from you.
The community should be private because it gives hand-picked people a sense of “privilege”. They’re more likely to share content or updates since they feel valued. It also drives FOMO in others who increase their engagement to gain such privileges.
These groups are great at building community and email lists. You can create a question box that asks for their emails before entering the group. However, it’s important to know when to send the emails. Since the people signed up primarily to access the private group, your emails shouldn’t come across as spammy.
This process also works in reverse. You can promote the exclusive group in newsletters to entice new subscribers to join it. Jen Lehner’s group for budding entrepreneurs is a great example of how to build an email list:
4. Use contests to build email lists
Giveaways and contests are still proven ways to build email lists. You can tweet or put up an Instagram story to announce a contest and one of the requirements for qualification can be email sign-up. Add a sign-up form to the contest page and see how many active users take the plunge.
If your goal is to drive email subscribers to social media, just run a giveaway email series to nudge them to your preferred social platform. Here Euronics Ireland is using giveaways to increase their email subscribers.
It’s important to know that giveaways or contests tend to expose brands to a non-qualified user base so make sure you optimize the terms to weed out irrelevant followers. After that, use the email verifier tool to confirm their authenticity.
5. Personalize your subject lines
The results of a campaign largely depend on whether people actually open your emails to check the content. Even if you write an excellent email to urge viewers to check out social profiles, it’s the subject lines that create the main difference.
Here is a subject line checklist you need to follow:
- Keep the subject line short. Ideally, it should be between 5–8 words. In some contexts, shorter ones work great as well.
- Keep it extremely focused on the offer or the value the email provides.
- Craft it in a way that invokes curiosity. Deeply research your audience to learn the content that resonates with them and doesn’t be afraid to experiment with punctuation marks and emojis.
- Use the preheader text box to expand the primary thought. It should complement the subject line and offer an incentive to open the email
- Do not use spam triggers or deceptive words. It doesn’t end well.
Swiggy is a food and grocery delivery app that has taken a light-hearted approach to their everyday emails:
Conclusion
Social media and email are cogs in the big wheel of omnichannel marketing. By following the above steps you can take the best social media and email have to offer and turn that into a brand differentiator in your industry.