How to Integrate Social Media with Email Marketing

Have you ever thought about combining your email with your social media marketing strategy?

After all, social media marketing is excellent for widening reach, and email marketing is an equally awesome tool to convert those people you’ve reached from being leads to becoming actual customers. So if you merge the efforts of these two marketing channels, there’s a higher chance for your business to see the results you’re looking for.

It’s no secret that small business owners have to go beyond the inbox to succeed today. Different approaches can be used for connecting with customers, such as coupons, online surveys, or even live events that will, in turn, drive business. 

Read on as we discuss how you can combine social media and email to achieve a higher return on investment (ROI) and overall growth.

Why do brands need to adopt a holistic view to be successful?

Many small businesses are struggling as a result of the significant economic recession created by the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. 

Several are being forced to take drastic actions such as cutting employee hours, allowing employees to work from home, and taking out new government loans that come with generous forgiveness terms just to stay afloat. 

Subsequently, businesses in this position are also being forced to adjust their marketing strategies in an effort to achieve better results in an economically-changed world. This is where integrating social media and email marketing strategies can deliver. Despite the attention given to social media marketing these days, email still reigns as one of the most effective online marketing channels out there. 

For instance, for every $1 spent, email marketing can generate $38 in ROI. Additionally, 38.5% of customers prefer social media – second to email – to be contacted about products and services. 

If you look at successful brands, you’ll find that most of them have already integrated all the branches of their marketing to create a better customer experience. You see, when companies have a holistic approach, the connections become consistent and seamless. Consistency is the keyword here.

In other words, whether a customer contacts customer support for troubleshooting, tweets their query on Twitter, or walks into a particular standalone store of the brand, their experience remains consistent. But when this isn’t ensured, it can adversely affect marketing efforts.

How can you combine social media marketing and email marketing to generate better results?

Let’s review the ways in which you can use these two massive marketing approaches cohesively to build your brand authority and grow business.

Determining a common language

For small business owners, pursuing brand integrity is very crucial. In fact, posting authentic content is one of the best ways to attract customers and get them to try out your product or service.

This is precisely why you need to sync your marketing language. If your social media and email speak different languages, it’s more likely for customers to doubt your brand’s authenticity. 

For instance, if you have a fun and engaging approach for your social media, but your email newsletters are overly formal, you might just lose your customer’s trust.

I would recommend conducting a brand identity survey to understand your customers’ perception of your brand and whether it aligns with your vision. You’ll then be able to sync up your marketing language by using the insights from the survey.

Using your email list for making informed decisions on social media ads

Running a social media campaign is generally an expensive affair for small business owners, but it’s an expense that’s well worth it, since it can lead to more potential customers.

But this doesn’t mean you can’t take measures to cut down expenditure. Use your email marketing to test ideas, such as finding which call to action gets more conversions, or which subject line technique that gets more emails to open. Send multiple emails using different content and wait for results. Use the content with the highest click rates for your social media ads.

Add your social media in your emails

Showing off your social profiles in your email can be an excellent way to support your advertising efforts without exceeding your budget.

This will help to increase engagement on social media platforms, helping people to feel more connected to your brand, and also giving mailing list subscribers value. You can ask them to follow your social media handles to win a product of their choice among other exclusive perks.

Grow your email list through social media channels

Now that we’ve established how you can use email to encourage social media engagement, let’s discuss the opposite approach where you use social media to grow your email subscriber list.

Customers that follow you on social media are more likely to be interested in subscribing to your email list, but they often end up getting confused if they aren’t directed in the right path, which might cause them to lose interest. This is where you need to jump in action by taking the initiative to provide them with the necessary steps to get them on board and subscribed.

You can post a link or use lead ads to encourage people to sign up for your email list without having to leave a social media platform.

Upload your email list to social media networks

You have the option to upload your subscriber list to several social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, among others. 

Through this list, follow your subscribers on social media, and proceed by creating a customer list of running promoted social media campaigns to arouse interest in your brand and what you have to offer.

Uploading your subscriber list permits you to place a name and face to your email subscribers as well. You can also listen to their pain points, learn about their interests, and address their queries.

Other tactics to unite your marketing efforts

In addition to the above methods, here are a few other tactics that you can use to combine your social media marketing and email marketing strategies.

Running interesting and fun contests

Running contests is an effective way to engage with your social media, but you can also use them to grow your email list.

After deciding an attractive prize and determining a call to action, ask your followers to participate by signing up for your newsletter as a way of confirming their participation. You can also promote an email update where you offer exclusive discounts and deals to further lock in their interests.

Scheduling posts on social media, reminding people about your email list

The best thing about social media is the different ways in which you can promote your email list. Hence, you shouldn’t rule out the idea of reminding your followers about your email list across different networks.

You can use tools to schedule social media posts for establishing a consistent and regular social media presence, along with adding a link to your email list landing page. Make sure that you explain what the user will get out of subscribing to your email list, and how your email list is unique.

Taking advantage of social media email digests

How about using a tactic where you find a way into your customer’s inbox without making them sign up for your email list directly?

For this, you need to create a group – either on LinkedIn or Facebook – and start publishing awesome content that makes people take notice of you. You’ll be surprised at the number of people who subscribe to email updates for Facebook groups they follow, which can make a significant difference to enhance your marketing efforts.

Users register on the social media platforms through their primary email accounts, so they automatically start receiving regular updates generated from activities inside the group – unless they choose to subscribe from the email notifications. Drive more social media shares through email outreach.

You can build ‘social proof’ for your email content by getting influencers as well as popular blogs to share content related to your brand.

However, you need to make sure that your content has received a couple of likes and has been shared several times before you request an influencer or blogger to share the published image or article on their respective platforms.

This approach is particularly effective if your content is visually appealing and aesthetically similar to the influencer’s brand themselves. It’s worth spending a few dollars on good graphic design, which can be found for quite cheap these days.

Well-designed content helps you build credibility, too – both from the point of view of influencers and that of your customer base. For example, if an influencer shares your content, and they see that they’re getting more likes and higher engagement, they won’t have second thoughts in sharing your content the next time.

The advantages of social media marketing and email marketing integration

Here are the top benefits of combining your social media and emailing efforts:

Diversifying platforms for subscriber interaction

When you use multiple platforms to offer opportunities, you widen your reach to prospects and customers as well as create new opportunities for engaging with them. You can then ask your subscribers to follow you on social media to stay in the loop about the latest offers, product launches, discount offers, contests, and so on.

Adding more subscribers to your list

Several shoppers make purchases based on social media referrals and recommendations, which is why word-of-mouth publicity is still relevant for raising brand awareness.

When people talk about your email or even post about them on social media, it will increase your brand’s goodwill. As more and more people learn about your emails, you’ll have a higher chance of adding more subscribers to your mailing list.

Enhancing marketing metrics on digital platforms

The transformation of marketing to digitization is forcing business owners to reimagine their business and marketing processes. It’s been a major challenge, with 93% of business owners reporting having issues with planning and implementing digital-based marketing, particularly when it comes to budgeting, employee skills and training, and public relations. 

But interestingly enough, digital transformation is actually driven less by technology and more by changes in customer expectations and behavior. Combining effective online marketing tactics like social media and email marketing will improve the conversion rates of your marketing campaigns. You‘ll be able to promote the possibility of getting better opens and click-throughs by applying social media marketing principles in your emails.

Boosting the potential reach of your message

You can improve the reach of your email across different marketing channels through this social and email marketing integration. Even if people don’t read your emails, they will still be in the loop about the recent happenings through social media.

These were some of the biggest advantages of integrating the two different media channels. As you can see, adopting this approach can be an excellent way to start a new online business and quickly achieve your goals.

Also, if you’re facing any difficulty in getting a hang of things, you can consider enlisting the services of email marketing experts to make your email campaign more organized and effective. It’ll be a win-win situation either way.

The bottom line

Social media marketing and email marketing, when used together, can be incredibly beneficial for your business. When used in the correct way, you’ll be able to improve results despite small business constraints, such as limited budgets.

There are plenty of other ways to integrate social marketing with email marketing in addition to the ones mentioned above. You can create brand-unique hashtags for better engagement, utilize user-generated email content for addressing relevant issues and whatnot.

As a small business owner and marketer, you need to understand that just as two heads are better than one, combining two strategies together will help maximize your reach and gain maximum ROI.

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