What is the ultimate objective of email marketing?
Due to low costs, versatility and degree of personalization, email marketing is one of the most effective ways to increase your Return On Investment (ROI).
Next question, what is the ultimate objective of social media?
Although email marketing is great in itself, social media is what you need to spread the word as fast as possible.
Why integrate email and social media? Simple, to have the best of both worlds!
With social media, you can further define your target audience. Using this data, you can create customized email campaigns with more targeted messages, which in turn significantly boosts conversion rates. Also, integrating social media with email is one of the most effective ways of growing your email list.
Think about it this way. When your email newsletter includes social media sharing buttons, your customers might share it through their social media spaces, instantly boosting your popularity.
Another take at this: including a call to action button (for example, a Sign Up button) on your social media page is a great way to increase your email list and generate new leads.
Before you get started with integrating email and social media marketing, there are two things that you need to check. First, check whether you have a sound email marketing strategy. By sound, we mean:
- Clear-cut goals
- A sizeable and segmented email list
- Well-defined target audience
- Explicit methods for testing and refine marketing campaigns
Second, check whether you have a well-charted social media strategy. Your social media strategy is well-charted if it takes into account the following:
- You know your target audience
- You know which social media channels your target audience frequents
- You have a content strategy in place
- You are monitoring your performance and improvising to be better
Got these in place? Great, let’s now talk about how to combine email marketing with social media to optimize your ROI. There are six ways to achieve this:
- Include social media buttons in your email newsletters so that they can share your newsletters via social media. Word of advice: keep the buttons positioned in such a way that they are easily visible.
- Upload your subscriber lists to your social media channels
Here’s how you do it on Facebook:
Here’s how you do it on LinkedIn:
- Create exclusive groups for your email subscribers. Creating an exclusive group on LinkedIn is a good way to leverage this strategy. Now, LinkedIn will send emails to members (your email subscribers), thereby providing an effective email and social media integration.
- Incentivize email subscriptions on social media by offering some freebies. Give them a reason!
- Hold contests on your website, which requires an email to enter. Share and publicize the contests widely through all your social media channels for maximum reach.
- Set email notifications for all your social media channels so that you have all that you need to know in one place.
Now you might be wondering how and what social media marketing channels to use. The most obvious one is Facebook.
“Facebook is responsible for 8% of all pageviews on the Internet (other sources put it at 20%). LinkedIn and Twitter hover closer to 1% of all pageviews, and Pinterest around 0.5%.” – Alexa
However, it is not the only tool. In fact, using LinkedIn and Twitter would greatly help boost ROI. This is because although Facebook dominates B2C social marketing, LinkedIn and Twitter rule B2B social marketing.
“LinkedIn’s presence in terms of social media marketing is continuing to improve, and with such a tailored audience, it is important for companies to focus on the audience LinkedIn provides in order to reach businesses that might be interested in working with them. It’s a business platform, and as a result it’s the obvious choice for B2B companies to incorporate into their marketing efforts.” – Kate Endres, Senior Social Media Marketing Specialist, Blue Fountain Media
So, in addition to Facebook ads and page posts, creating LinkedIn groups, LinkedIn advertisements, twitter posts are some really good strategies. Note that each social media site has its strengths. Hence, you must personalize your strategy accordingly for best results.
To summarize, the perfect equation for success is:
Do you have something to say on integrating email marketing and social media? Then please do share it on the Comments section below.
