Saima Alibhai, Practice Manager – Professional Services at Bronto Software, explains how to combine email marketing with social media.
Email is still converting best for a variety of reasons, but you can improve user experience and revenue growth even further with cross-channel promotion. While the power of social media is immense, many marketers are unsure how to combine their email marketing and social media strategies. Let’s look at how you can deploy social media to enhance your email efforts, effectively use your advertising pounds, build organic interest in your brand, secure followers as email subscribers and, most importantly, bring more shoppers to your website.
Target Social Based on Email Data
Use your email information to inform what segments you’ll buy on social media. For instance, if female shoppers ages 25-34 in specific postcodes are responding at high rates to a certain offer, buy a social ad targeting those same demographics. This will help you stretch your social media advertising budget much further. Then take the results from the social media ad, and use it to refine your email messaging and segmentation. Always be listening and looking at popular posts on your social sites. These are messages that clearly resonate well with your target audience, so turn them into emails.
Request User-Generated Content
Finding ways to curate and integrate user-generated content into emails is probably the hottest social trend in email right now. Encourage customers to post selfies with your products, and then use those images in future emails. For example, enhance a promotional message with user-generated content as a kind of testimonial for the email’s featured product. Many customers are honoured to have their content used by their favourite brands. Just be sure you have the usage rights. In addition to asking for selfies and content, consider including a social feed as secondary content in your emails if you have that capability. It works especially well for image-based sites, such as Instagram.
Consider a Contest
Contests are a great way to integrate social in an email campaign. You might organize a social media scavenger hunt with clues hidden across your social channels. With this type of contest, be sure to include email as a part of the campaign, with one of the clues coming from this channel. It can be an effective way to promote your email sign-up via your social sites, as you can advertise the contest in advance on those channels in an effort to gain additional email subscribers.
Email and social media are distinct and different marketing channels that can both be effective for your business if you design your campaigns to leverage the strengths of each. Continue to find new ways to connect with your audience and integrate social into your email programme – there’s so much more out there beyond the traditional “Like us” emails.
