7 Tips For Integrating Social Media With Your Email Marketing

When considering social strategies people often think about integration with websites and other media, but integration with email is just as important.

Here’s 7 tips to help you integrate social media with your email marketing:

1. Send a dedicated social email to existing customers – Many brands already have minor visibility for social channels in emails, perhaps some share buttons under email content or all of their social logos at the top or bottom of an email. To really focus your customers response on social, try sending out an email that just directs people to a single social presence. To target further, make sure you send people to the social presence that’s most relevant to them. Send business customers to your LinkedIn page and your younger customers to Facebook or Instagram, that way you’ll continue to communicate with them on the most relevant platform.
2. Email capture on social – You’ll often find that your customer database and your followers on social sites have significant overlap, but there will always be people who follow you on social sites that you don’t have in your database, especially valuable prospects who may not yet be customers. Engage them on social media in a way that encourages them to provide you with their email address. Competitions, surveys, free ebooks or other types of free content often work well. Using these tactics to acquire a following can lead to an unengaged and unresponsive following that’s not brand loyal, however these people are already following your brand on social and you’re simply adding another communication channel for them.
3. Use the data – Now that you’ve got an email database and email addresses for those who follow you on social media you can start to look at the data. How many people overlap? How many are customers? How often do social followers buy our products compared to those who have signed up to our email database?  What percentage of Facebook fans are customers compared to Twitter followers? Asking these questions and finding the answers in the data will help you better understand your customers and prospects and inform future marketing campaigns.
4. Make it easy for people to share – The fewer barriers for sharing content that customers have to overcome, the more they’ll share. Make sure that social icons are clearly visable around content that you want them to share. Don’t overwhelm people with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Bebo, Myspace and every other social site under the sun – focus on what’s best for your customers and serve that dynamically in emails if you have the option.
5. Use social to access networks – One of your most powerful customer acquisition tools is your current customers. People who already buy and love your brand would be happy to share it with their closest 400 friends and family on Facebook, if only you made it easy for them. Pick a segment of your customers who are really engaged with a certain product and incentivise them to share it on social media. People who buy your products are highly likely to know similar people who are right in your target market. Utilise their network.
6. Don’t duplicate content – You should be using your social presence and email databases for different types of communications. Email can be very specific and targeted, and almost a one-to-one conversation. Social should be used for broader engagement of your demographic on that site.
7. Repurpose content – While it’s not okay to simply duplicate, it is a good idea to take great, inspiring content from social media and give it exposure in an email, especially customer generated content which people will trust much more than content that comes from your brand.

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