Social media is clearly one of the best ways of reaching your target audience. Similarly, email marketing can be very useful to bring in conversions. Nearly 93% of B2B marketers use emails to distribute their content. About 40% of them also say that email newsletters are crucial for the success of their content marketing campaigns.
Social media, on the other hand, has over 3.484 billion users. This is why it’s a favored mode of marketing as well. Combining social media and email marketing gives you a powerful combination that can help improve your brand’s reputation and sales. Here’s how you can do so:
1. Be Consistent to Build a Stronger Brand
You will only get customers if they see your brand as one that is trustworthy. For this, you need to maintain consistency across all channels through which you interact with them.
When there isn’t enough coordination between your social media and email marketing teams, your messages may have a different tone. This can harm your brand’s consistency.
It’s crucial that you create a brand guide in which you establish your brand voice. It should also give a personality to your brand. Once you have a guide, it’ll help all of your teams maintain the right tone and be consistent with your messaging.
2. Add Subscriber Lists to Social Media
If you’re doing email marketing, you’ll most likely have a subscriber list. You can target these subscribers on social media as well. They will be highly targeted audience because they’ve already interacted with your brand previously.
Additionally, when you import the email IDs on social media, you’ll be able to develop a deeper relationship with them. It also allows you to find out what their likes and dislikes are. This way, you can find out how you can solve their problems through your products and services.
Social media also helps you establish a community. You can share interesting content with your email subscribers in the community, and this might win you some more followers as well.
It’s also possible to create custom lists for paid promotions on social media platforms such as Facebook. When you add your email subscribers in this audience, the probability of them interacting with your brand increases as well.
3. Include Social Profiles in Your Emails
If email marketing is your strength, you can use it to improve your presence on social media. All you need to do is add social buttons to all of the emails that you send to your subscribers.
If your subscribers like the content in the email, they may click on the share buttons and post it on their social media profiles. This could prompt their connections to start following your brand.
In addition, if they find your emails useful, they might even follow your social media profiles. All you need to do is add your social media follow buttons to your emails. This can give a huge boost to your social media presence.
4. Recycle Content
If you create unique content and use it on just one marketing channel, you’re wasting it. You need to recycle your content and share it on different marketing channels to make the most out of it.
Email marketing and social media are channels where it’s very easy to repurpose content from one to use on the other. However, for this to succeed, it’s crucial that your teams communicate well.
The Notion app uses this method of promotion. Whenever a new update is coming up, they post GIFs on Twitter to increase anticipation. When the update is released, the very same GIFs are added to the email announcing it as well.
Image via Twitter
5. Retargeting
Retargeting is a great way to reapproach people who have already interacted with your brand previously. You can retarget those email subscribers who’ve clicked on your emails through social media.
All you need to do is add a UTM tracking code to your URLs to see how visitors are visiting your website. Through this method, you’ll easily be able to find those who’ve clicked on your emails and come to your website.
However, managing multiple UTM codes is a tough task. To make it simpler, you can use tools such as UTM.io, which can help you manage them with ease. You can also create UTM templates using it.
Image via UTM.io
Once you’ve found people who visited your website, you can easily target them through social media promotions.
Doing this can help you increase brand awareness. At the same time, if you’re selling something, you can encourage the people to purchase the products by offering discounts in the retargeted ads.
You can use tools like AdEspresso to create and optimize these ads on social media.
6. Build an Email List Through Social Media Communities
If you’re active on social media and have built a large community, such as a Facebook Group, then you can use it to populate your email list. One way of gathering email IDs is by asking members to provide them when they’re joining the group.
Alternatively, you could ask your members if they want to join your email list. Some of them might happily give you their email IDs in exchange for helpful content delivered to their email inboxes.
7. Posts on Social Media About Your Email List
You can use social media to give a boost to your email list. One way of doing this is by adding a link to subscribe to your email list in your social media posts. It’s crucial that you explain to the users what benefits they will get by subscribing to your emails.
Intercom does this extremely well. They add custom images to their tweets and add the link to subscribe in their caption.
Image via Twitter
8. Let Social Media Send Emails
This is an indirect method of email marketing in which you use the social media’s emailing list to your advantage. LinkedIn, in particular, is useful for this method of marketing. Whenever you subscribe to any group on it, you get added to their email list as well.
Whenever there’s any activity in the group, all members will receive an email about it. The idea is to create helpful content and share it on your LinkedIn group. When you do so, emails about the posts will be sent to your members. The “from” name of the email will be the group’s name, so that increases the chances of the email being opened as well.
For instance, Content Marketing Academy is a group on LinkedIn. When a member posted on the group, an email was sent out to all members.
Image via Buffer
Final Thoughts
Email marketing and social media marketing may be two different forms of marketing. However, by using them together, you can make a solid combination that can help you increase your brand awareness, lead generation, and sales.
You can reuse the content that you create on both channels. And you can use your email lists to create targeted promotions on social media. Additionally, you can add social buttons to your emails and post on social media to invite your followers to subscribe to your email list.
Are there other ways in which email marketing and social media can be combined for marketing success? Let me know in the comments.
About the Author: Shane Barker is a digital marketing consultant who specializes in influencer marketing, content marketing, and SEO. He is the co-founder of Attrock, a digital marketing agency. He has consulted with Fortune 500 companies, influencers with digital products, and a number of A-List celebrities.