How to integrate email marketing with a social media strategy
Source: Aaron Beschel
We talk a lot about the value of email marketing. After all, email marketing is the king of the marketing kingdom with a 3800% ROI and $38 for every $1 spent. Email can help lead prospects down your sales funnel, and encourage existing customers to spend more time with your brand.
But email marketing isn’t the only way marketers are getting traction in the digital space. Content marketing, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads, and social media are all helping marketers achieve their goals.
There’s more power when these tactics are used together, so in this post, we’ll explore how you can integrate your email marketing efforts with a social media strategy. The two can complement each other to take your marketing to the next level.
Why the most successful brands have a holistic view
The most successful brands are able to integrate all branches of their marketing together to create an amazing customer experience. These brands have a holistic view of digital marketing and believe that email and social media work best when they’re used together.
When a company has a holistic approach, the connections are seamless. Whether a customer corresponds with the brand on Twitter, gets help troubleshooting through customer support, or walks into a brick-and-mortar store, the customer feels that they’re getting a consistent experience.
But many brands don’t provide this experience, and it can negatively impact marketing efforts. When marketing teams are siloed, communication breaks down, and it’s hard to integrate new initiatives. It becomes more difficult to run and promote campaigns, and team members become frustrated because they feel they’re limited in what they can do.
If your brand is struggling to provide a seamless digital experience, you should consider integrating your email marketing and social media efforts.
Assess where you stand with your team
Before you can start sending your social media following asks to sign up for your email newsletter, you have to assess where you stand right now.
If you have a separate social media team, start by meeting with them. When you do, ask the following questions:
- How are we already integrating email marketing and social media?
- What social media goals can I help you reach using email?
- Do you have any ideas for how we can use social to reach our email marketing goals?
- What resonates on social media that doesn’t seem to do as well in email?
- What resonates in email that doesn’t seem to do well on social?
Having answers to these questions can help the two teams work together to develop a plan for moving forward.
Get calendars in sync
You might already have an email marketing calendar, but does it effectively loop in your social media team? Is your social media team using a calendar that you don’t have access to?
Sometimes, teams wind up doing the same work twice simply because they’re not aware of what the other team is doing. For example, your social media team might have a comprehensive holiday calendar that could help your email efforts. Alternatively, you might have a holiday calendar that your social media team could leverage.
Integrated calendars can help ensure that everyone is on the same page, and has an idea of when campaigns begin and end. Calendars can make it easier to work together to promote initiatives, and can help you schedule without conflict.
Using a calendar tool can make coordination easier. Here are a few favorite options for marketing calendars:
- Project management tools such as Trello
- Editorial calendars like CoSchedule, Percolate, and Kapost
- Google Sheets or Google Calendar
- Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Outlook
Show off social profiles in your emails
Once the email marketing and social media teams are on the same page, you can begin to figure out ways to further support each other.
Email marketing can help increase engagement on social media by reminding subscribers that your brand has an active social community.
Fruit of the Loom encourages subscribers to engage with their brand in a fun and interactive way through this email:
Fruit of the Loom explains the benefit of social media to their brand and what you’ll get from the two main channels they use. They also have a contest to win a product of your choice when you follow the brand on Facebook.
This strategy not only helps increase engagement on social media, but it also gives subscriber’s value, and can help keep them even more connected to your brand. By focusing on the promotion of one social network– rather than three or four– it makes it easy for subscribers to make a decision about what action to take such as following your brand on Facebook for updates.
Encourage people to sign up for your email lists via social
You can promote your brand’s social media profiles in your emails, but you can also encourage social media followers to sign up for your mailing lists.
One of the best ways to do this is through the use of Twitter Cards, which allow subscribers to sign up for an email list without ever leaving the social media platform.
Here, Moz encourages Twitter followers to sign up for the Moz Top 10, a bi-weekly email of curated articles.
The Barista Bar uses the same strategy to encourage followers to sign up for their Coffee Club, which requires an email address.
Just as you use Twitter Cards to promote your email initiatives, you can use your Facebook page to promote joining your email list, as well.
To do so, add a subscribe form to your Facebook Page. (It’s a simple set-up process, just follow these instructions. SXSW uses this strategy on their Facebook page to encourage their social fans to subscribe to their mailing list.
You can also remind social media followers of the cool stuff that happens on your email list, encouraging them to join. For example, Birchbox teases the benefits of signing up for their email list in many of their Facebook posts. Here, they share that people on the email list get exclusive offers.
Upload your subscriber lists to social networks
One of the absolute best ways to integrate your email and social media marketing strategies is to upload your subscriber lists to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media networks.
You can use these uploaded subscriber lists to follow subscribers on social media, run promoted social media campaigns to those who are already interested in your brand, or simply create a customer list.
Facebook’s Custom Audience Feature is particularly good for this, and is used as a tool to increase your success using paid reach.
Uploading your subscriber lists will help put a name and face to your email subscribers. It will also help you listen to them. What are they gabbing about? What is interesting to them? What are they sharing? Knowing more about your subscribers can help you craft better emails as well as better social media posts.
Retarget ads on Facebook and Twitter to interested email subscribers
Ads are expensive, so you want to be deliberate about where you spend your funds. Retargeting those who are already interested in what you have to offer leads to better conversion rates and eliminates the chances of sending out irrelevant ads.
To set up a retargeting campaign to hit interested email subscribers, you’ll install a tracking code on your website. If you send an email to subscribers that leads to your site, you can then target ads to only the people who clicked to that page.
Wrap up
Marketers are finding more and more ways to integrate email marketing with other efforts. There are many ways to marry email and social media. We’d love to hear about how your team uses email and social together to achieve success.
Integrating Email Marketing with Display Advertising
by Leslie Van Zee
Integrating email with your display advertising campaign is a great way to increase your response rate from your advertising methods. Throughout history, marketers have always searched for creative ways to target consumers via email or display ad campaigns but few have tried to integrate the two methodologies into one seamless campaign- until now.
Integrating email marketing into a display ad campaign boosts recall by 13%, according to Smart Insights. Many business owners report having a close relationship with many of their regulars and email marketing has long been a great way to stay in contact. When you integrate this with display advertising, you have a win-win scenario.
Email marketing can be an excellent choice for keeping in contact with the customer. If you’re located in the US, you can use a service like ConstantContact, Aweber or MailChimp to help you stay in touch with your customers. Just be sure you adhere to CAN-SPAM act (penalties are up to $16,000 per email sent that does not comply with CAN-SPAM).
How to set up email marketing
- Getting a list started – this is the most difficult part. Sending the list is easy but first you have to build the list. Some people will be interested in signing up but keeping them on the list means you need the proper balance of marketing messages; not too much and not too little.
- Signups on website- one of the easiest ways to start building your list is to place a sign up form on your website. One method is to add it on the blog as well and use your email list to send out updates on the blog.
- Social media- You can also use social media to help drive consumers to your email list to sign up. You can direct them there from your social media networks and Facebook also has apps that allow you to integrate this directly into your fanpages.
- Choosing an email service- choosing a service to send your emails and newsletters is important. MailChimp is an-easy-use, popular service that is free to up to 12,000 emails a month to a list of up to 2,000 subscribers. There are many great, free templates to make it easier as well. Other services to consider are ConstantContact and Aweber but there are many more if you do some research.
Now that you know how to set up your list and your email marketing campaign, the next step is to integrate it with your display ads.
How to integrate with display
- Include links to your website – you can place links to your website in your ad as well as a call to action (CTA) that sends the viewer to your site. You can even use a CTA that says “Go to our website to sign up”.
- Place a cookie on your website, remarket display ads to that cookie
Remember that to be in accordance with the spam laws, you must have the “unsubscribe” link at the end of the emails and occasionally people will use it. Don’t take this personally. Sometimes they will even say they never asked for your updates (although they clearly did). Don’t feel upset about this. The point is to allow the consumer the choice. If you’re giving them quality content and interesting info, there’s a good chance many will stay around.
A study done by Smart Insights show that online advertising campaigns are enhanced when the email marketing channel is added. This works because you are increasing reach and awareness. Their study found seven interesting facts:
- The combination of display and email advertising improves advertising recall by 13% compared with just display advertising
- Email increases disposition to buy in 47% of cases and is therefore ideal for increasing conversions
- Spending power as a target group – by using email you can precisely reach your target group
- Email allowed the required level of advertising to be reached three times more quickly than display advertising
- Email advertising is welcomed and viral effects significantly improve the reach of campaigns
- Advertising/brand association is exceptionally strong within the younger target group
- The mix of email and display campaigns boosted web traffic by a factor of 4
See more of the study and results here.
When you learn to integrate email marketing with your display advertising campaign, you will have a successful method of reaching more consumers, interacting with your customers on a different level as well as increasing traffic and ROI.