Modern marketers are often in flux about which their clients and prospects communicate more effectively: email or social media.
But both email and social media marketers often forget that, with very distinct strengths and weaknesses, email and social are essentially distinct channels. While email is the most strong channel for retention and transaction driving, social communication is excellent for immediate communications driven by the community.
So let’s stop arguing once and for all about what’s the best channel. This is simply not the correct question. Let’s ask instead, “How can we use each channel’s strengths — and create them work together?”
Here are two main methods you can use email and social together:
- Use social to expand your list of subscribers.
- Use email to encourage social sharing and increase your social fan base.
If individuals on social channels demonstrate interest in your brand, they may also be interested in your messages. Think about ways to engage your active follower base, inform them about your messages, and make them sign up as easily as possible.
Remind your followers of your newsletter.
Do you even understand that you’ve got a newsletter? Maybe they don’t.
The first and easiest step to turning supporters on social media into email subscribers is to remind your supporters and supporters of your newsletter and provide a connection to a signup page.
When you do this, the advantage of signing up should be obviously articulated. Creating attention by:
- giving your newsletter a preview of the type of content subscribers can expect.
- Offering registration incentives (e.g. access to exclusive content or discount).
- Give email-only deals or discounts previews.
While this can be implemented quickly and easily, it removes the user from the social channel, possibly interrupting the browsing experience. This need not be the situation. With customizable tabs from Facebook and lead generation cards from Twitter, your supporters can subscribe to your newsletter without having to leave the social channel.
Us Facebook’s customizable tabs for newsletter signups.
The brand pages of Facebook give customizable tabs, which you can use to win new email subscribers. Facebook supporters can sign up for your newsletter with an opt-in tab without having to visit a landing page or your website— everything is happening right on Facebook.
Many email service suppliers (ESPs) give their own Facebook apps for collecting newsletter signups, which you can customize and incorporate into the Facebook page of your brand. If your ESP does not give an app, a Facebook signup tab can be created manually. To do this, attach your fan page with a static HTML iframe tab and copy and paste your signup form code.
Use Twitter’s Lead Generation Cards.
Twitter also enables you to gather email addresses with its lead generation cards, which are components of the Twitter advertisements toolkit, directly on Twitter. They consist of a picture that can be customized, a description, and an action call. You can attach lead generation cards to a tweet and share them with your followers— in this case, it’s free— or encourage them through sponsored tweets to any other crowd on Twitter.
Users of Twitter who want to enter your mailing list can do this with a single click of a button— without leaving Twitter or having to fill in a complicated form. In the lead generation card, the name, @handle and email address are prefilled using data from the Twitter profile of the user.
How to use email to promote sharing and growing your fanbase on social media?
Email can be a strong driver of social engagement if you have an active subscriber base.
1.) Includes Social Icons in your email.
The simplest way to inform your subscribers about your extra channels is to include icons and links to your social profiles in your messages. In most instances, marketers put social icons on an email’s very top or very bottom.
It’s simple and easy to implement including social icons in your email— and that’s likely the primary reason that 76 percent of all email marketers are already using this method. But while it’s simple, no extra data or actionable guidance is provided to the reader.
- What are the social channels you can expect?
- What are the advantages that your email does not give from the social channels?
- Why should those links be clicked by the subscriber?
- Icons alone do not answer any of these issues.
Always keep in mind the objective of your campaign and ask yourself whether the inclusion of social media icons will help you achieve this objective or whether they will only remove your campaign’s primary CTA. If you choose to include them, make clear why you should be followed by your subscribers or share your personal newsletter.
2.) Run a Social-Focused Email Campaign.
Running a campaign aimed at promoting your social channels and the advantages of each channel that you give is a way to use email to develop your social base.
3. Promote a Social Contest
To encourage social contest, you can also use email. This strategy makes your subscriber very clear why they should switch from email to another channel— they have an opportunity to win something. And, as we understand, a wonderful motivator for action is the concept of having something free.
4. Cross-Channel Campaigns
Up to now, we have used social only to encourage email signups or the other way around. But in any event, only individuals from one channel were encouraged to use the other as well. These methods can be strong and are the first step we see in too many marketing departments to break the siloed strategy. True cross-channel campaigns, however, involve a step further.
