Why integrate social marketing and email?
Many business owners, managers, and marketers don’t take advantage of the many benefits of combining marketing strategies. Social media or social marketing and email marketing are important marketing channels that complement each other and provide a great source of analysis and feedback. Both channels provide an opportunity to stay in touch with customers and provide future leads at the same time.
Social sharing buttons or badges are a wonderful way to spread the word about a brand or product. Lead generation should always be at the top of the funnel. Email marketing provides a great opportunity to embed or share links to social sites like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Don’t forget to provide something of value at the end of the tour. When people find your social page interesting and find valuable information or offers, they are 4 times more likely to share your page with their friends and associates.
Remember how and why you got someone’s email address. It’s good to know where the email address comes from. Was it from social media, a lead nurturing campaign, perhaps from an interesting blog post? It’s always a good idea to separate an email list into groups of top-of-funnel acquisition channels. Make sure each email campaign targets the email owner’s likes and interests and has relevant information available on the social sharing site they are likely to visit.
When posting on social media sites, make sure the content includes a mix of text and images and contains useful and interesting information that will work well for both existing customers and your lead generation funnels. This is especially true when sending emails. Take a look at the first five posts on all your social media sites. Do they correspond to the subject of the pending email?
One of the worst mistakes made when emailing and posting on social media is not including the proper calls to action and a strong lead generation funnel. Each email must, at a minimum, contain a link to a social media page or website that provides additional information related to the subject of the email. If you are directed to a page, the page should include share and like buttons for your social media pages. If you are directed to a social media page, the page must include links to a page on the website. Both pages should include additional calls to action and a secondary step in a lead generation and conversion funnel. Don’t forget that every touch point is an opportunity to collect an email address or to share or share on social media.
The implementation and composition of email and social media campaigns provides a fluid and flexible path for interconnection and cross-pollination. Topping off the opportunity is the ability to design metrics that can be tracked and used to hone messaging for both channels into one finely tuned lead generation and conversion machine. An added benefit is data collected that can be used to improve the success of future emails, website additions and modifications, and perhaps the addition of additional products and services.