How to Promote Your Social Media Channels via Email

Email marketing has been one of the oldest yet the most effective online marketing strategies over the last decade.

However, the number of active social media users is constantly growing and it’s predicted to reach 4.41 billion people by 2025, so companies see great potential in social media marketing, too.

In the last few years, social media platforms have evolved from communication tools to solid marketing channels where businesses can get in touch with their target audiences with ease, promote their products and services, and even sell them in-app.

Although over 50% of customers choose emails as the primary method of communication with brands, both big and small businesses know the importance of social media platforms for growing brand awareness and building a loyal community, so they integrate email and social media to get better results.

The Importance of Social Media Integration with Email Marketing

It’s no secret that email and social media are the most important marketing channels for most businesses, so integrating social media with email marketing can be beneficial for your brand. It’s important to integrate email and social media for the following reasons:

Your email subscribers are loyal customers

Emails blast customers from all sides. On average, people receive 121 emails a day, so if your email subscribers still want to receive emails from your brand, chances are that they are loyal to your company which means you can interact with them on different platforms for maximum impact.

Your customers get new options for interacting with your brand

Email is great to deliver information in a personalized way, but this one-way communication channel isn’t the best option for interacting with customers. When you promote social media via emails, you get an opportunity to analyze your following, read followers’ comments and messages, and therefore understand your target audience better.

Social media users crave brand communication

Today, people spend a considerable amount of time on social media, so it’s easier for them to get information from brands they like on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. In fact, 57% of people follow brands on social media to learn more about products and services. Having a social media presence is therefore a must.

Social media platforms offer business-specific features

From building brand awareness to driving ecommerce sales, social media channels have a variety of built-in features like paid ads, clickable links, in-app checkouts and much more that help brands achieve their business goals on social media platforms.

If you run successful email marketing campaigns, it’s high time to promote your social media accounts and convert your engaged subscribers into social media followers who can help your business grow.

Here are three reasons to promote your social media accounts via emails:

#1. Grow Your Social Media Following

Every company aims at growing their social media following. It’s easier to interact with followers, deliver your brand message, show off your products and therefore turn followers into your potential customers. Simply put, the more fans you have on social media, the more you increase your potential customer base.

Here are a few proven ways to grow your social media following with emails:

Add Social Media Icons

Social media platforms attract users from all over the world. The most popular platforms are Facebook (2.6B), YouTube (2B), Instagram (1B), Twitter (330M), Pinterest (322M), according to this report. It’s very likely that your customers have at least one social media account.

When getting in touch with brands, customers choose the channels that they use often. Today, an average user spends 3 hours a day on social media, so it’s no wonder that more and more people follow their favorite brands on social media.

Simply put, if you have a presence on social media, add relevant social icon elements so that your email subscribers could follow you on social media. Moreover, to further refine your social media strategy, consider leveraging advanced analytics. A prime example is to connect Facebook ads to Looker Studio, a powerful tool for data exploration and visualization. By integrating these platforms, you can gain deeper insights into the effectiveness of your Facebook ad campaigns. This integration empowers you to make data-driven decisions, optimize your ad strategies, and ultimately achieve more impactful results.

Check out how Title Boxing did it in the example below:

Give Premium Access

If you want to create a sense of belonging that strengthens the bond between your brand and customers, it’s a good idea to tell your email subscribers that your social media followers get premium access to something valuable.

In fact, you can use various lead magnets to spark interest in your social media accounts:

• Useful: how-tos, discounts, educational tutorials, brand freebies, reports, audio/video training.
• Entertaining: brand stickers, inspirational quotes/lists, quizzes, giveaways.

Obviously, knowing your target audience is a must. When you know your customers’ needs and wants, it’s easier for you to decide on a lead magnet.

For example, Z Skin informs their email subscribers about secret discounts on their social media profiles:

The company tells its subscribers about premium access their social media followers get and informs that the sale is time-limited. It creates a sense of urgency and therefore encourages people to take action faster.

For most customers, when a brand gives their following premium access to something valuable, it is a solid reason to follow your brand on social media. As a result, you convert your email subscribers into followers and therefore get more chances to turn your social media followers into paying customers.

Organize a Giveaway

With the love for free stuff, social media giveaways help brands create a buzz around their brands and increase user engagement. In fact, social media accounts that hold giveaways grow their followers 70% faster.

Having a loyal email subscriber base, it’s a good idea to spread the word about your giveaway via email and therefore attract more participants.

However, remember to make it easy for email subscribers to participate. If you want to grow your following, simplify the entry requirements, and ask email subscribers to follow your brand on social media.

Choose a prize most participants will love. For example, BaliBody offers a $250 gift card for their products as a prize so that the winner can test their products or choose favorite options.

#2. Provide Social Proof

The number of options in the modern market is constantly growing, so it can be difficult for customers to decide what products to choose. Thus, they turn to their friends and family for product recommendations as they seek out social proof.

Here are several ways to provide email subscribers with social proof and therefore spark their interest in your social media accounts.

Show user-generated content

The idea of posting user-generated content isn’t new. Since 3.5 billion people are smartphone users, it doesn’t take much time or effort for them to take photos with their phones. Moreover, loyal customers are more likely to take photos of your products if they are satisfied with the quality.

If you feature this content on your social media platforms, not only do you show appreciation to customers who post it, but you also provide potential customers with social proof.

Featuring user-generated content is a great way to show that you have product fans who buy from you and recommend the product to their friends and family.

With the right email marketing campaign, you provide subscribers with social proof, but you also tell subscribers that you seek out user-generated content from your loyal consumers. Here’s this strategy in action from Fabletics:

In the example above, the company shows the variety of UGC photos to their email list and includes a call to action with a relevant hashtag to encourage interested customers to share their content. Win-win!

The bottom line? Your customers are more likely to produce UGC for a chance to get featured on your social media profile and they are more likely to follow your business on social media to keep an eye on your newsfeed.

Feature social media customer reviews

Today, customer reviews matter more than ever. Living in the era when 84% of people trust online reviews as much as recommendations from real-world friends, it’s important for brands to get positive reviews from their customers and therefore ease the worried minds of potential consumers.

In short, showing a product with several reviews is a great idea to grab the attention of potential customers and therefore increase sales.

Luckily, social media users are more likely to share their thoughts about your product as they believe it can help other shoppers make the right decision. Thus, they write their thoughts (both negative and positive) on their accounts or business profiles.

For example, Facebook allows people to write reviews on business profiles, so it can be a good idea to give your followers this opportunity to repurpose their feedback into customer reviews and feature them in your emails, just like Naturopathica did.

But if you want to grow your social media following, you can also tease your email subscribers and invite them to read more customer reviews on your social media account.

Share social media milestones

If you want to provide social proof and encourage other customers to join your social media profiles, share social media milestones. Philosophy has a great example of this strategy in action:

Not only did Philosophy invite email subscribers to join their Facebook page with a simple CTA button, but they also provided readers with alternative social media profiles so that all interested customers could join their communities easily.

#3. Increase Ecommerce Sales

As an email marketer, it’s likely you know about the power of upsell and cross sell in emails . When it comes to social media integration, sharing your accounts can help to boost sales, too.

How? Today, social media platforms offer a variety of business features so companies can interact with hooked audiences and turn them into paying customers in-app.

Let’s find out how to attract more social media followers and encourage them to buy from you.

Give Product Recommendations

With the great number of products on the market, it can be difficult for customers to make the purchase decision these days. Not only do they pay attention to customer reviews, but they also read product recommendations from companies they support.

For brands, this means an opportunity to provide customers with valuable content and bring attention to specific products.

Social media profiles help brands feature product recommendations (carousel posts, albums, highlights, etc.), so it’s a good idea to tease your email subscribers and invite them to learn more on your SM.

Check out how Sony uses its Pinterest to create various pinboards so that followers can find relevant products with ease.

The holiday shopping season is coming, so it’s just the perfect time to send seasonal ecommerce emails and feature gift guides on your social media profiles so that holiday shoppers can draw inspiration from your suggestions. When done right, these product recommendations spark interest in your products and therefore help you sell more.

Announce a Live Sale

Looking for a new creative way to keep your audience engaged? Announce a live sale!

This recent research found that most users hold their phones vertically 94% of the time and vertical videos see a 90% higher completion rate than horizontal ones. Vertical video marketing is becoming more and more prevelant these days, and perhaps, one of the most popular techniques is live streaming on social media (mainly Instagram and Facebook).

Live streams are available for a limited time only, so it creates a sense of urgency that encourages people to watch your stream. The good news? Most social media platforms have a broadcast feature, so it’s easy for brands to organize a live sale where your customers can purchase discount items in real-time.

If you give social shopping a try, you can build an e-store on social media platforms and feature best-selling products with product information and prices. It can help interested customers learn more and make the purchase decision more confidently.

To boost ecommerce sales, you can learn from Deep South Pout and use your email campaign to announce a Facebook live sale:

If your live sale attracts many customers, that’s great. But you should be ready for a great number of questions, so it can be a good idea to hire a social media coordinator who can read all questions and provide answers while your representative shows the variety of products on sale and draws attention to them. If you need some help in the recruiting process, make the most use of LinkedIn.

Share Exclusive Offers

When you share special discounts or time-limited offers with your customers, they feel a connection to your brand which increases brand loyalty and trust. As a result, they are more likely to choose your brand over your competitors and buy from you.

To promote your social media account and increase sales, the easiest way to do it is to share exclusive offers on social media profiles and tell your email list about it.

But if you want to bring your business to the next level, use this idea to do market research. How? First, invite your loyal customers to share their product preferences and then put those products on sale, just like Stadium did it:

As you can see, Stadium informs its customer base about products on sale and invites them to follow Stadium’s business profile on Instagram so that they can vote for the next flash sale. It’s a great example that shows how to increase ecommerce sales and promote a social media account without being too pushy.

Conclusion

Over the last decade, email marketing has been extremely effective, but the popularity of social media platforms forces brands to jump on the bandwagon and have a social media presence.

However, having accounts on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest is great, but this means nothing unless you interact with your followers and invest time and effort into growing your accounts. Also, another option to organize your online communication with customers more productively is using shared inboxes to manage all in one place and it has many benefits of using shared inbox.

Thus, it’s important to turn your loyal email subscribers into social media followers. Here are three main reasons to promote your social media accounts via emails:

• Grow your social media following
• Provide social proof
• Increase ecommerce sales

Once you start combining social media and email marketing efforts, you can see your business growth that can result in a more loyal customer base, engaged customers, and higher revenue.