A good marketing strategy is like a well oiled machine where all the different cogs and gears interlock and work together to deliver the optimal results for your business. Unfortunately, for many businesses this simply isn’t the case. Marketing efforts are often disjointed and haphazard with no unifying strategy across the various marketing channels.
Fear not though, because we at SmartrMail with our expertise in email marketing have created this guide for how integrate your email marketing and social media marketing strategies. Specifically, we’ll show you how to optimise your emails to gain more followers on your social platforms, and how you can use these platforms to grow your email subscriber list.
Ultimately the goal is to have your email marketing and social media marketing strategies working in tandem not only to support each other but to help grow your business.
Why the Current Approach Doesn’t Cut It
Let’s start with why most eCommerce stores fail to integrate social media properly, as well as failing to capitalise on email.
Most email campaigns are sent with little links in the footer to their social media sites such as in the example below. And while some emails will have the links more prominent than others, rarely do businesses deviate from simply including a link or icon and hoping that people click it.
The problem with this approach is that there’s no incentive whatsoever for the person reading your email to actually go through the effort of following you on social media. And while this may not seem like it requires much effort to do, you need to remember that inboxes are crowded places and people’s time and attention are valuable commodities. If you’ve made it past the first hurdle of getting someone to open and read your email, you want to make it as likely as you can that they’ll start following you on social media.
Simply letting people know that you have a Facebook page or YouTube channel isn’t going to persuade people to join if they don’t feel that it’s worthwhile either. As for those who do believe that following you is worthwhile, they would most likely have already started following you. The goal is to convince those who don’t currently think it’s worth their time to subscribe to your YouTube channel or like your Facebook page.
Weaving Social Media into Existing Email Campaigns.
The best way you can maximise the number of email subscribers converting to social media followers is to offer them something of value in return for following. This must be communicated within the email. A good example of this is shown in the email below.
This email campaign was to inform their subscribers of a weekend sale. Most emails sent to communicate a similar message would merely only include the first graphic with the “Shop Our Instagram”. This particular email however includes four additional images that were posts from their Instagram account and are linked to their account.
This example is good because it’s clearly showing what’s on their Instagram account that people not following are missing out on. Having multiple links to their Instagram also makes it more likely that someone will click through, especially in comparison to only one tiny link in the footer.
This email could also have been improved by adding a title above the four images along the lines of “Our Latest Instagram Posts” and then a clear call-to-action (CTA) button directly underneath with “Follow Our Instagram”. These would highlight what those who are not following their Instagram account are missing out on and the CTA would help get even more people to visit their Instagram.
Other Ways to Drive Social Media Followers
The above example shows how you can incorporate your social media into an email you’d send anyway. Of course, this is not limited to emails about sales but you could easily employ the same approach to welcome emails and abandoned cart emails if you’ve automated them. In addition to this, you should also consider sending emails with a dedicated focus on boosting your social media profiles.
An example of this would be a fortnightly or even weekly newsletter style that devotes a large section to updating email subscribers with what’s been happening on your social media channels. This could include a list of the top performing Instagram posts, or the most viewed YouTube video. Another example would be to include a newsworthy item from the week or fortnight gone with an invitation to “continue this conversation on Facebook/Twitter/our Telegram live chat”.
Another option you should consider is having multiple welcome emails. This would enable you to dedicate one of the welcome series of emails to getting people to follow you on social media. Below is a good example of such an email.
This particular email also does a good job of highlighting the exact benefits of following them on each of the four different social media channels.
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Key Points to Remember
The key points to remember when using email marketing to grow your social following are the following:
- Make sure you’re communicating the benefit of following your social media account;
- Make sure your social links within your emails are obvious and easy to find;
- Don’t treat your marketing channels as stand alone silos; make sure to integrate your strategy across all your channels.
Conclusion
By following these steps your email marketing will do a much better job at complimenting your social media strategy. However you should not stop here, utilising your social media following to grow your email subscriber list is just as important, and plenty of platforms such as Facebook make this easy with custom CTA buttons you can add to posts. Just as you shouldn’t neglect your social channels when crafting your emails, the reverse should also be the case. In the modern world – synergy is king.
