5 Ways to Integrate Email and Social

5 Ways to Integrate Email and Social

People have been ringing the death knell for email marketing for more than a decade, but email marketing is one of the most efficient uses of your marketing dollars available. Meanwhile, social media marketing is the darling of every company, even in the face of an increasingly saturated and competitive space.

But what if we told you that these two channels can work together, becoming more than the sum of their parts? Here’s how to help your email and social strategies work together.

1. Upload your Subscriber List to Social Networks

Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook all offer you the option of making custom audiences to serve your ads and boosted posts to, and what better place to start than the people who have already subscribed to your email list? Export those lists from your mail clients and import them as custom audiences, and you’re guaranteed an audience that’s already expressed an interest in your product. There are a few benefits to this:

• Relationships: knowing who you’re talking to and establishing an interactive conversation with your customers is always a good thing, and it’ll make your brand stick in their mind more permanently. It’ll also keep your customers happy after their purchase, which enhances brand loyalty and turns customers into advocates.
• Feedback: some of the most useful information about the future of your product or your company comes from your customers. If you’re interacting with them on social media, you can get a better sense of what they like and what they don’t like.
• Community: the more you interact with the people who are already subscribed, the better you’ll be able to expand that audience by finding more people who have the same things in common.

2. Take Advantage of Retargeting Ads

Running ads can be expensive, and running ads without any sense of who’s seeing them is a good way to throw money down the drain. But if you’re able to run precisely targeted ads, the ROI can be substantial.

By installing a tracking code on your website, you can tell which people have clicked on the CTA in your email (or blog post or anywhere else). Then, on your social media channels, you can retarget those same people.

This is an even more precise method than uploading subscriber lists. Rather than targeting all your subscribers, you can target only those subscribers that clicked on a particular offer or downloaded a particular ebook or whitepaper.

3. Use Social Media to Send Email

When people download a whitepaper and have to type in an email address, some of them are giving you a fake address or their old college one that they’ll never check in a million years. When they sign up for email alerts from Facebook or LinkedIn, though, those emails are probably going straight to their primary account.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds, though — you have to create a strong community, and that takes work. If you do, though, you’ll be able to send emails from the groups you’re in or the pages you manage on a regular basis, all pre-formatted and professional.

4. Collect Email Addresses on Social Media

You’re probably already soliciting email addresses at checkout and through CTAs elsewhere on your site, but there’s no reason you can’t do the same on your other channels. The angle is simple: some people prefer to get their news from your company piecemeal and in real time, in which case social media is perfect.

But others prefer to keep up with your company in the form of daily or weekly digests that they can peruse in their free time. For those people, an email newsletter is ideal. There’s a good chance that there are followers on your social media accounts that don’t know about the option to subscribe to your emails, so let them know!

5. Create a Private Facebook Group for Subscribers

If you want to add some exclusivity to your brand, consider setting up a special Facebook page for your subscribers, premium members, or existing customers. You can offer them early deals on new products, exclusive access to certain content, or anything else that you want to use to incentivize better participation.

Creating the group is simple — just use Facebook’s Groups feature and set the privacy settings to “private.” You’ll be able to send links to invite particular people, while non-subscribers won’t be able to see the group if they search for it. It takes more work to maintain both groups, but the added brand loyalty might be worth it!

Keep Experimenting

The fact is, there’s no one solution that works for every single company. Your strategy will depend on your company, your customers, your product or service, and how you want to communicate. The best thing to do is just start trying things and see what works for you. Keep tweaking and adjusting, track your results, and you’ll have a winning strategy in no time.