The Importance of Integrating Email Marketing Campaigns with Your Social Media
A lot of whispers about the supposed “death of email marketing” are starting to seep up along the cracks in the online promotion world, and with the massive proliferation of social media combined with certain changes to email filtering processes, it’s easy to see why people might believe the rumors of email’s demise in the face of the social network marketing.
Luckily however, email isn’t dead, it’s simply evolving, and you as a marketing professional don’t need to destroy yourself worrying so much as you simply need to adapt with it.
Now, we’ve already covered social media tips before, but here we’re going to cover here adapting and improving your email campaigns with social media in a few concise and specific tips; so that you can keep your email campaigns strong while also planning for the future of marketing.
Email Isn’t Dead, But Attention is Fragmenting
We’ve clearly stated above and stick by the idea that email is definitely not dead. If anything, whatever you’re doing that works decently without email will be dramatically helped by integrating with to your email marketing campaign. Furthermore, the stats for a lot of marketers are clearly showing that a very healthy percentage of traffic still comes from their inbox oriented campaigns that were created through the classical email opt-in funnel –sometimes as high as 80% or more for marketers that use a mix of blog, site, social media platforms and email campaigns.
However, what is happening is a fragmentation of general user attention in their daily web browsing. While your potential customers are still regularly checking email and seeing your messages, they’re also browsing interesting content found through the social media pages they follow and surfing the web through their mobile devices, again, usually via social media but also via regular search.
What this fragmentation means is for you is that, while your email can still have impact, you need to spread content and sales pitch delivery so that it filters into other media and captures that wandering attention.
Connect Email Messages to Social Pages to Blog Posts
Interconnection of media is probably one of your best friends. This is because it lets you take maximal advantage of visiting eyeballs and make sure that wherever you’re getting visits from every potential source if readers.
Thus, your email mail outs should consist of posts that click right back into your blog instead of being written in inbox based html format, and the blog posts your emails link out to should all be connected to your social media accounts through share buttons that are prominently displayed.
As an added bonus, you should allow comments on any content you create and build them through the Facebook commenting tool, making people more likely to intentionally or accidentally engage with your promotional content and spread its existence to their friends.
Finally, what you email should mirror what you post on your actual site and what you do through both email and blog or site posting should be represented right there in your Facebook, Google+ or Twitter feeds. A lot of email marketing services offer easy ways to spread content around in this way, www.reachmail.net, being a good example.
Use Tech Tools to Funnel Traffic into Social Media
Undoubtedly, your email campaign and its associated blog or site content should be focused on channeling visitors toward your social media presence on a consistent basis. Why? Because while email and blog content are still robust and healthy, social networks are a still developing frontier that you need to colonize as thoroughly as you can with followers as a hedge against future marketing trend changes.
One excellent way by which you can pull this off is to make sure that all of your promotional and information content that isn’t already integrated with your social network accounts gets connected to a social promotion services such as Wetpaint. What Wetpaint does is ask everybody who stumbles across your site or blog content to follow you on Facebook or Twitter if they want to read more of what they’ve started looking at.
The reader can click no and go right back to reading or they can click yes and continue reading but as a newfound social media follower of yours. According to the company that provides this, the service is nearly guaranteed to raise your social following by as much as 40% within as little as a year or slightly less, simply by converting some of your casual or regular blog/site visitors into followers.
Collect Email Opt-ins Right Through Facebook Pages
Finally, you probably didn’t know that you can actually get fresh email opt-ins right through your Facebook fan pages themselves, with an opt-in form and all.
Thanks to services such as 5 Minute Fan Page, you can set up an email opt-in and unobtrusively let your regular visiting fanbase slowly give over their email addresses for later promotional offers and fresh unique content. The cost of these emails will probably range from 20 cents to a dollar per address (nobody said these services were free) but the long term effect can give you significant sales if combined with high quality product promotion inside your Facebook fan page. Conversions seem to also be higher through the above process than they are for the classical blog based email opt-in.
About the author: Stephan Jukic is a freelance writer who generally covers a variety of subjects relating to the latest changes in white hat SEO, marketing, marketing tech and brand promotion. He also loves to read and write about subjects as varied as the idea of a location-free business, portable business management, and strategic marketing and advertising tactics. When he’s not busy writing or consulting, he spends his days enjoying life’s adventures either in Canada or Mexico.
