Besides the obvious stuff, like adding social media icons in the header and footer of your email template, testing subject lines and tracking your success, there’s a lot more that digital marketers can do to increase their email marketing campaign’s likelihood of success.
Before you craft your next email marketing piece, take some time to re-evaluate your email marketing strategy. Do you even have a strategy? Is it written down? Does it include a content plan? Does it include a delivery schedule? For the savvy email marketer, these questions might seem elementary; however, there are far too many senior level digital marketers who don’t have an actual strategy in place and they’re basically winging it and praying for the best outcome possible. That’s definitely a recipe for disaster.
If you’re struggling with integrating email marketing with social media, here are 13 tips to help you successfully integrate these marketing channels.
1. Provide a reason for (or benefit of) sharing your email marketing piece with friends and colleagues. Does your email contain a great coupon that expires in 24 hours? Does your email contain a link to a webinar that’s filling up quickly? Use bold calls-to-action like “Your friends would love to know about this great deal. Share it!” or “Your colleagues would benefit from this informative webinar – share it!”
2. Make sure your call-to-action stands out. Are you asking your email recipients to spread the word about a new product you recently launched – but your call-to-action is at the bottom of the page? Move that call-to-action to the middle of the page. Go one step further and create a visually appealing graphic that reads: Let your friends know you knew about this before they did. Share this!
3. Mention your call-to-action more than once. Consider adding your call-to-action at the top, bottom and in the middle of your email. It may seem a bit redundant, but busy people have an extremely short-term memory.
4. Make it very easy to share your emails. Consider using a pre-defined tweet or Facebook update in your emails. This pre-defined content automatically populates when a reader hits the share button. This is extremely effective because you get to control exactly what your newsletter readers say when they share your email content. Also, by pre-defining tweets and Facebook updates, you can ensure the appropriate hashtags are used.
5. Send customers to the most relevant social networks. You might consider sending your brand’s younger demographic to Twitter and Instagram and sending your brand’s older, long-term customers to Facebook and LinkedIn. Before you can do this, though, you must segment your email marketing database. In the strtagey development stage, do some research to learn more about which social networks your current customer base is using.
6. Keep lead generation in mind. Consider developing social media promotions designed to capture emails. Free eBooks, webinars and white papers work well for B2B brands, while limited-time discount codes and free gift cards work well for B2C brands. Set a monthly budget based on how much you’re willing to spend to capture leads. For example: If you give away one $100 gift per month and you capture 100 leads, you paid $1 per lead.
7. Activate your attentive and loyal readers. If you already have an email marketing program in place, here’s where your email marketing statistics will really come in handy. Identify every person in your email database who has opened at least 60% of your emails in the past 12 months. These are people who regularly open your emails because they find your emails useful or entertaining. Develop email marketing pieces designed to dangle carrots in front of these regular newsletter readers: You’re a valued customer so we’re offering you a 25% coupon that’s good for only 24 hours. Share this great deal with your friends before it expires!
8. Promote popular social media content in your email newsletter. Using your email newsletter to promote popular Facebook posts is a great way to leverage your community’s engagement. Social media users often want to weigh in on popular discussions and learn what other members of your community are saying. Point your email recipients to a popular post by saying something like: Did you miss our latest popular Facebook post? Over 100 shares and 300 comments!
9. Add social media icons to your unsubscribe page. Create a custom landing page for email recipients who choose to opt out. Add social media icons to the page and ask: Is your inbox getting too crowded? Like us on Facebook instead.
10. Create snapshots of your email newsletters and add them to Pinterest. Snapshots are brief summaries of the important items mentioned in your latest email marketing piece. You can create a visually appealing snapshot and pin that snapshot to one of your boards on Pinterest.
11. Test your email subject lines. Pay special attention to your subject lines so you can determine which subject lines result in the highest open rates. These high-performance subject lines will make great headlines for Facebook ads. They also make great opening lines for Facebook posts.
12. Test image effectiveness in emails. Monitor the click-thrus on images you use in your email campaigns. Images that have a high click-thru rate in your email usually double as great images to use in your Facebook ads.
13. Consider adding a signup form to your Facebook page. Instead of just adding a static signup form to your Facebook page, consider creating a video that asks people to signup for your email newsletter. Your video should: (1) detail the value of subscribing to your newsletter, (2) tell your community how often you will send them email if they subscribe, (3) provide reassurance that you won’t sell their information to a third party and, (4) show them an example of what your newsletter looks like. Remember to keep your video short – less than 2 minutes – and point people to where they can sign up.
Hopefully, the 13 tips provided will help you get started integrating email marketing with social media quickly and easily. If you have any great tips to share, please leave a comment.