How Social Media Tools Can Help with Your Marketing Campaigns

Until recently, social media and e-mail have operated as two completely separate entities. You can “like” websites and videos, but if you received an e-mail you liked, you couldn’t exactly hit “like” on it to share it with friends.

For marketing campaigns, this has been a hindrance. If your small business is e-mailing newsletters, coupons, or just great messages to your distribution lists, there may be times when  your recipients would love to share the information with their friends on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+. Maybe your recipients haven’t considered it, but seeing that “like” button will give them the idea.

Recognizing the need for this, Campaigner has added this functionality to its popular e-mail marketing platform. Through social sharing, users can “enable sharing” when launching a new e-mail campaign. This automatically archives your content online, complete with a “share” bar at the top of the screen. You’ll also be able to track all page views that occur as a result of your content, including any views on social media sites.

“The synergies between email marketing and social media are evident, particularly as email marketers explore the value of enabling their messages to be easily shared on social networks like Facebook and Twitter,” said Paul Turnbull, Product Manager, Campaigner. “Instead of having to deal with both an email marketing service and social media management tool, customers now have the ability to share emails on multiple social platforms through one easy-to-use interface. We are excited to deliver on many of the top requests from our customers and look forward to meeting their evolving email marketing needs.”

Campaigner is only the latest of many e-mail marketing businesses to integrate social media into its platform. With social media becoming so important in today’s marketing campaigns, many services have searched to find ways to implement new technologies. Some of these services include:

• Constant Contact–Constant Contact allows you to add Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn links to your e-mails. Once your customer clicks, they are taken to your social media page, where they can like and share information about your business.

• Vertical Response–Through its canvas editor, Vertical Response allows you to add a “Like” button to an e-mail. The canvas editor allows you to create HTML e-mails, which are necessary for the Like button to be visible to your recipients.

• Mail Chimp–Mail Chimp has recently added new tags that will allow you to incorporate Facebook like buttons, Tweet buttons, and Google Buzz tags. The site also offers YouTube merge tags that can help with incorporating video into your marketing campaigns.

• iContact–iContact allows users to easily add Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn buttons to e-mails, choosing whether these buttons should apply to the entire message or just a section.

• My Emma–This site allows you to add a Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn button to e-mails by simply clicking a button that says “Add Social Sharing” as you’re creating your e-mails.

The above solutions also offer analytics on the buttons you add. In fact, chances are with any marketing campaign service business you choose for your small business’s marketing campaign, you’ll have the option to include social media buttons. So the key is to find the e-mail marketing solution that works for your small business and learn how this new integration of technology can help improve your marketing campaigns.

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