How Can My Social Media Efforts Support My Email Marketing Programs and Vice Versa?

We’re all trying to figure out exactly how social media fits into and boosts our marketing efforts. Last week, I highlighted a Q&A with Paul Gillin, where he touched on the overlap between social media and direct marketing. Today, I’d like to point out two interesting articles from DM News that address ways that social media and email marketing support each other. They are:

• Problem Solver: “How can I integrate social media with my email marketing program?” by Nicholas Einstein

• “How to use social media to grow your email list” by Morgan Stewart

Here’s what I’ve learned from these articles. Email (one-to-one personal communication) is the preferred vehicle to convey promotional offers and drive transactions. Social networks are a great platform from which you can provide customer service and collaborate with fans. Ideally, people will follow you in both channels. Therefore, you want to use each channel to drive your audience to the other channel.

I’ve summarized the synergies between social media and email marketing into four main beneficial actions:

1. Listen to and learn from your social community—let your fans help you hone your marketing message (same point that Paul Gillin made for direct marketing).

2. Deepen communications with your audience by giving them multiple ways to converse with you. If people find you on social media, make it easy for them to link to your email programs. If you reach them via email marketing, encourage them to join your social communities.

3. Make it easy for your audience to spread the word and tell others about you by adding a “share-to-social” function in your email communications.

4. Encourage people to subscribe to all types of communications with your organization. Make sure members of your social networks know they can stay in touch via email subscriptions and invite people to join your social communities via email messages.

The bottom line is, we want to have as many conversations with our audience as possible and we want to encourage them to share these discussions with their friends.

Comments

[Sara Kmiecik]

Very interesting post. Since email is essentially the most popular form of online social communication, I don't think it will be long before email marketers will be using social media on a regular basis to help increase our efforts.