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.

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