Email Marketing Strategy: use social media to grow your contact list.
You can use social media to add subscribers to your email contact list.
If you developed a digital media plan and are running an integrated internet marketing campaign then you already have a social media presence (and if you are not, you shoudl have…). So, occasionally, ask your Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin followers and friends if they want to be on your email list and provide them with a link to your contact form signup page
(remember that you can have that signup page as an embedded contact form from your email marketing system as we have explained in a previous post). And do this “occasionally”, you do not want overwhelm them with pleas and when you invite them, be sure to explain the value and benefits your email Newsletter delivers so they can interpret the invitation as something worth considering.
When you are in the process of preparing a nice email piece that will be filled with value, take the opportunity to tease your friends and followers about the upcoming issue and invite them to signup. You can even post a synopsis of the upcoming piece to motivate them to signup. For example, if you follow @3emailmarketing in Twitter, you can see that we are frequently senind invitations to followers to come to this blog and read us… if they do, they might link to our website and if they like wahat they see, they might sign up through our contact form in our Whitepaper Section… it sounds as a log process, and it certainly is but we do not want to spam people with invitations, the ones that really reach our contact form are the ones really interested in receiving our Newsletters.
You can embed a “Join My Mailing List” signup form on your Facebook Fan page, this is not something trivial to do but if you ask your Internet marketing consultant, your internet marketing agency or your website developer to help you, they will certainly do it for small fee or as part of their consulting services to you.
If you want to be more sophisticated, you could sign into an advanced Twitter management and automation software through which you could send a DM (direct message) to your followers inviting them to sign up to your list, but remember to be explicit about the value of the Newsletters as well as about the frequency with which email blasts will be sent.
We will cover more on social media integration tomorrow: Email Marketing Strategy: adding interactivity to your email marketing. Stop by!
