Email Marketing Strategy: integrate social media into your email marketing campaign
Like email, social media has quickly become one of the most widely used communication mediums on the web, so integrating both can increase the overall effectiveness of your internet marketing.
The power of social media lies in the ability of its users to quickly and easily share information with their contacts, which might then turn around and share with their own contacts thus creating a viral effect. If the information being shared is, for example, a piece of content from one of your emails, this type of “word‐of‐mouth” marketing can extend the reach of your message by a tremendous margin.
Many popular email marketing systems in the market are already integrating connectors to the social media landscape. Here are a few ways to integrate social media into your email program:
- Incorporate a social media bookmarking tool into your emails, allowing subscribers to share your newsletter to their contacts on various social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.)
- Develop and maintain a company profile on various social media networks, and prompt social media contacts to consider subscribing to your email newsletter(s)
- Promote your social media presence on your emails in order to build a larger social media following
- Start a company blog and use your emails and social media profiles as traffic generators
While the World Wide Web continues to generate exciting new forms of human interaction, including such Web 2.0 offshoots as social networking and video‐sharing sites, wikis and blogs, what is just as exciting are the engagement‐marketing opportunities that result from the joining of both old and new Internet‐based communication technologies. Email and social networks represent such a nexus.
Clearly, social networks have changed the relationship between companies and their customers. Sites like Facebook and Twitter allow people to share their thoughts and quickly connect with hundreds of friends and friends‐of‐friends. Individuals linked to one another on a social networking site are affiliated for a reason. They’re like each other in some important ways. Social email marketing, therefore, enables you to reach prospects that share some affinity with your best customers. The ability to reach out to others with attributes similar to your best customers is invaluable.
In our next post we will suggest some ways to connect your email marketing campaign to your social media efforts, all within an integrated digital media plan.
… tomorrow we will cover this topic: Email Marketing Strategy: use social media to grow your contact list… To be on top of frequent email marketing info, follo @3emailmarketing in Twitter.
