Integrating Email and Social Media to Amplify Your Marketing Efforts

Running a successful business is all about making the right decisions. Everyone knows that.

You can have the best quality product out there, but if you choose to target the wrong market, you will never reach your goals.

The same goes for Marketing.

Billions of dollars are invested every year, globally, in marketing, advertising, promotions, events, and so on.

Brands are leaving no stone unturned to ensure that they make their presence felt.

It’s all about increasing traffic and expanding their customer base, to increase sales conversions and revenue.

But are all marketing efforts leading to the planned results? Are all those billions of dollars actually grating a high enough ROI?

Marketers know how difficult it is to make the right marketing decisions. Whether it’s about which channels to use, which message to convey or which audience segment to target, the big questions are endless.

Here’s another question for you. Which is better: social media marketing or email marketing?

Trick question. Both.

You should go with both and build an integrated social media email campaign.

In this article, we will tell you why and how.

What’s the Difference Between Email Marketing and Social Media Marketing?

Email and Social Media Marketing have both been doing wonders for brands all over the world.

While Email Marketing delivers the highest ROI of all digital marketing channels with more than 3800% ROI, Social Media is great in building an online community and creating a closer bond with your followers.

In fact, 42% of the world’s population have social media accounts. That’s 3,234,000,000 people.

Email Marketing and Social Media Statistics

We have compiled some interesting Email Marketing vs Social Media statistics that will show you how powerful these two channels are, and how beneficial they both are to any business.

Total Number of Users for both Email and Social Media Channels

Users By Age Groups for both Email and Social Media Channels – Source: Optinmonster.com

How Consumers want to Receive Promotional Content – Source: shortstack.com for retail businesses

Email Marketing Metrics – Source: getresponse.com

Social Media Engagement Rate for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram – Source: optinmonster.com

Conversion Rates for both Email and Social Media Channels – Source: take5mg.com

How To Create Successful Email Marketing and Social Media Campaigns

Research shows that integrating Social Media and Email in a holistic Digital Marketing Strategy can be quite beneficial.

But, before talking about how integrated social media and email marketing strategies can be achieved, let’s take a look at some ground rules that need to be available for the success of any digital marketing campaign.

1. Create Good Quality Content

Social media channels are content driven, and the quality of your content can literally make or break your brand’s digital image.

Judging if some content is good or not can be very subjective, differing from one target segment to another, and even from one customer to another.

However, there are some indicators that qualify the quality of the content, regardless of the channel, such as how original, creative and valuable it is.

The content you produce has to be good enough for your followers to want to stick around and look forward to more receiving more content from you.

2.     Know Your Audience

You need to ask yourself:  “Who is my target audience and what do they like to see?”

Answering this question will help you determine your brand positioning and brand image and decide on what kind of content you will be creating.

Sometimes, the social media storytelling formula is as simple as giving your audience exactly what they want to see and read.

3.     Post on Social Media/Send Emails Strategically and Regularly

With Social Media and Email Marketing, consistency is very important.

Your brand needs to stay relevant. You need to stay in touch with your audience, which helps with building a stronger connection and building up your brand recognition.

You should also keep in mind the most optimized posting times before sending out your content.

For example, studies show that during the week, you should post on Social Media or send out emails between 3-7 pm.

On weekends, traffic decreases. It might not be the best time to post something important.

Why You Should Integrate Social Media and Email Marketing in Your Digital Marketing Strategy?

Improve Brand Awareness

Your reach increases significantly when you use both marketing channels to reach your audience.

It creates familiarity and makes it easier for your customers to get access to your brand through various channels.

Seeing the same kind of content and brand identity creates a link between your target audience and your brand, which becomes easily recognizable and embedded in your customers’ minds.

Increase your Online Followers and Email Subscribers

Cross promotion between email and social media campaigns help expand your following.

If you have a substantial email subscriber list and less social media followers, you can use email marketing to boost your online community (on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and other) and vice-versa.

It will also create curiosity and compel more users to receive your emails, with the idea of staying up-to-date with launches, offers, and more.

Better Understand Your Target Audience

By integrating social media and emails, you’re also opening up your brand to a bigger pool of customer information.

This means you can further refine your target audience analysis and fully understand what type of users are your primary customers.

The more refined this targeting is, the better the lead generation and conversion rates will to be.

Diversify Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Using exclusively social media marketing is quite risky.

When you think about it, you don’t really have control over your social media accounts.

If one day, Facebook or Twitter decides to permanently delete all business accounts, you will lose everything you’ve worked so hard to achieve.

Following an email marketing strategy alongside your social media efforts will save you potential regrets in the future.

Not to mention that email marketing has proven to guarantee a longer Customer Lifetime Value compared to all social media channels combined, as this chart shows.

Source: neilpatel.com

Stand Out From the Competition

Today, there are millions of people on social media with more than 1 active accounts, so your emails, no matter how valuable, might just go unnoticed.

Using social media to keep your email marketing active is a wise strategy, and will prove to be beneficial in the long run as well.

How to Integrate Email Marketing with Social Media?

In order to implement a successful social media and email integrated campaign, you should first start by determining the objectives behind this.

You need to understand that email marketing and social media marketing can not replace each other.

As we saw previously, each channel brings different benefits to your brand. Therefore, your approach shouldn’t be to eliminate one channel and focus all your marketing efforts on the other.

Instead, you should find a way to combine the two. That’s why we keep saying “integrated” social media-email strategy.

Email and social media are complementary: the one serves and completes the other.

• Social media is useful in growing and expanding your subscriber list and online community, driving traffic to your website, building a close relationship with your followers (brand loyalty).
• Email marketing is the king of conversions. After building up your brand recognition through social media marketing, email will convert your community into paying customers.
  Emails are perfect for customized and targeted messages and retaining clients.

Here are some ways you can Integrate Email with Social Media.

Reaching your audience is essential, so using both the platforms to promote each other isn’t a bad idea. You need to engage in cross promotion.

Promote your Social Media Accounts via Email campaigns

You can send out emails to your already established subscriber list, letting them know about your Social Media Handles and where they can stay up-to-date with your brand.

Here’s an email example by New Look, where they heavily promote all their social media accounts: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, and Pinterest.

                                            Subject line: Are you a social butterfly?

The email includes snippets from their channels and gives the subscribers an idea of what kind of posts they will be seeing on each specific channel.

Each box contains a call to action and a redirect clickable link to New Look’s SM accounts.

The subject line used in this social media email is catchy and tells the subscriber right away what this email is about.

Add Social Media Icons to Your Email Newsletter

Another easy way to promote your social media accounts using email marketing is to simply integrate links for your social media channels at the end of every email.

Here’s how you can add social media icons to your email template, using Chamaileon.

In the Chamaileon app, you simply drag the social icon and drop it in the specific place in your email template.

You can choose the social media channels you want to add.

By default, you will see: Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, and Twitter. But, you can also add more social icons such as LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, Tumblr and more.

You can then modify the social icon style (flat, circle, transparent, etc.) and their color.

Finally, add the URL links.

Embed Email Signup Forms on your Social Media Channels

You can use your social media email integration to let your audience know that they can reach out to you via email. Your goal here is to expand your subscriber list.

Social Media signup forms are a great way to increase engagement rates and help brands know more about the demographics and preferences of their target audience.

Mailchimp has a great article about how to add or remove a signup form on your Facebook page.

Facebook Email Signup Form Example – Source: Mailchimp

Use incentives, Giveaways, and Contests on Social Media and Email

Rewards and incentives are an effective way to get your customers talking about your brand.

For example, you could start a contest on Instagram where the first 100 new subscribers to your monthly email newsletter will receive an exclusive goody package or some premium service.

If you’re a retail brand, this is the perfect opportunity to get your customers acquainted with a new range of products or services, by offering samples or free trials.

The whole idea of the reward is to give people a reason (beyond brand preference) to want to subscribe to your emailing list or follow your social media page, whichever you give preference to.

Here’s a social media email example from the retail brand Topman.

In their email campaign to promote their new collection of cuffed trousers, Topman included a small incentive encouraging their subscribers to “share their take on the style” using the hashtag #topmancuffed and get the chance to win a 250 dollar gift card.

As you can also see, Topman spiced up its email campaign by adding a clickable video.
Using video marketing in email marketing and social media can be very beneficial in captivating your audience’s attention and increasing engagement rates. There are many free online video makers that can help you create eye-catching and professional-looking videos for your campaigns.

Simple, yet effective.

Create a VIP Community

Apart from rewards, users also like to be part of elite groups that distinguish them from others.

Many brands have special VIP clubs, which are basically communities that offer additional perks to a certain group of customers.

On those lines, you can always create a VIP email club or list, where anyone who subscribes to your emails can avail special benefits.

And yes, this can be a major factor for attracting more and more users to join this list, which helps with expanding your database with better leads.

In a Nutshell

As dynamic as the marketing world is today, our marketing strategies need to keep up with the pace as well.

It’s smart to always keep options open and not let a single strategy stretch out for too long.

Today’s online consumer is highly intelligent, well informed, and exposed to a number of different options.

So, for your brand to stand out and truly leave a mark, integration of email and social media marketing will be beneficial for any brand, regardless of the industry.