As a digital marketer, you shouldn’t rely on a single channel to reach your customers. Email and social media marketing both play critical roles in boosting engagement, spreading brand awareness, and making sales.
Luckily, there are steps you can take to implement email marketing and social media campaigns more efficiently than you already are. Try to think of both channels as complementing each other; keeping them separate prevents you from leveraging the overall benefits they have to offer. Using them in conjunction results in a much stronger overall strategy and a greater chance of success.
Follow Your Subscribers on Social Media
Many social media platforms give you the option of uploading your email subscriber list. After you’ve employed a list clean up service to remove any fake emails, uploading this list lets you put a face to the names of people you’ve been emailing. Now you can study their tastes and preferences more closely. As a result, you’ll have a better understanding of who your customers are, and what steps you can take to appeal to them with your email marketing.
This is particularly helpful if you ever plan to run a Facebook ad campaign. Facebook allows you to create a Custom Audience from your Customer List, so you have a greater degree of control over which types of users see your ads. By following your current email subscribers on other social media channels, you can use what you learn to target the best possible audience.
Use Social Shares to Drive More Social Shares
Social proof is key to an effective email and social media marketing strategy. Consider that 85% of consumers trust reviews they find online as much as peer reviews. Additionally, the top websites people turn to for online reviews are Yelp and Facebook.
What exactly does that mean? It simply means that if you want influential people to share your posts, you need other people to share and review them first. If you reach out to an influencer asking them to re-tweet your posts or share your content on Facebook, they’ll be less inclined to do so if they see that no one else has engaged with the content yet.
You need to establish the fact that your content is valuable before people will begin broadcasting it. That means waiting for your more loyal followers to share it first before you start contacting others.
Wait until a social media post has earned a few shares, then go back and email someone in your industry who has a lot of social media followers. Those initial shares will provide the necessary social proof, boosting the odds that others will also be willing to share your post. And influencer marketing can go a long way: It’s been proven to increase basket size and directly impact sales.
Increase the Size of Your Email List with Exclusive Social Media Groups
Email content is useful as a means of boosting audience engagement, but readers often lack the ability to actually discuss this kind of content. Social media allows for a greater degree of interactivity. Thus, integrating email marketing and social media can help boost the level of engagement on both platforms.
You may want to offer your email readers the opportunity to join an exclusive Facebook group where they can discuss your messages and even access extra content. Just ask them to refer two or more additional people to your subscriber list first. When people determine something to be scarce or exclusive, they’re more likely to have a positive opinion regarding the product or service. This is in part due to a person’s innate FOMO (fear of missing out) that makes them act on something if they believe it will run out or is not accessible to everyone.
This strategy offers two clear benefits. First, you’ll grow your overall subscriber list, but you’ll also establish another platform customers can use to engage with your brand. It’s a win for both your social media marketing campaign and your email marketing campaign.
Thinking about email marketing and social media as separate marketing tools limits what you can do with them. Use them together, and you’ll boost their overall effectiveness. Incorporating these ideas into your strategy will make it easier to achieve this success.