Two important marketing channels today are social media and email.
Social media continues to grow exponentially, not only among the giant media channels but also emerging networks. Facebook has more than 2 billion active users worldwide who spend an average of 20 minutes per day on the social media site and who contribute to 510,000 comments every minute. Meanwhile on Twitter, 330 million users sending more than 500 million tweets per day! How does anyone get any work done anymore?!
And, while many people may think email is dead or dying, it is still one of the most cost effective tactics for reaching customers and leads. There’s one great test of email’s health according to SocialMedia examiner: the number of times you’ve checked your email today.
Together, these channels can extend the reach of your email and grow your email list as well as promote your content via social media and allow users more opportunities to connect with your company.
How to integrate your social media and contact list
Many email marketing systems allow you to connect your account with your Twitter or Facebook ad accounts to create custom audiences. This empowers you to target your social media ads directly to your email subscribers.
You can also upload your email contact list to Twitter to “find people you know.” This then gives you the ability to to create lists in Twitter to better monitor and respond to contacts by following them on the social network.
LinkedIn also allows people to upload a list to add connections. Once you upload your list, LinkedIn will find users who match your contacts. You can then connect with them all or select individuals to send connection requests to.
How to collect email addresses on social media to grow your list
You can use social media to request email addresses or signups right within the social media platform.
On Twitter, you can create a “lead generation card.” These “cards” allow Twitter users to share their email address easily with your company with very little effort aside from a simple click. However, creating lead generation cards does require a credit card to run regardless of whether you have, want or need a Twitter ad account. Additionally, you’ll want to offer something in exchange for that user’s email (such as an e-book, white paper or other resource), which you may be doing already through your other inbound marketing efforts.
Facebook lets you add a page button below your cover photo for a quick call to action. Just hover over the button and click the pencil icon that appears to edit the button and select “Sign Up” from the Contact options.
Or, go to your settings and click “Edit Page” to add an email sign up tab to the left column of your Facebook page.
MailChimp makes this very easy with their Facebook integration and allows your Facebook signups to be added to a specific list in your MailChimp account.
In YouTube you can use “cards” or “end screens” to link videos, website and polls or to promote things to viewers at the end of your video. This allows you to invite viewers to a landing page or other lead capture/conversion page connected to your email marketing system or marketing automation system where they can give you their email address in exchange for some offer.
NOTE: Cards and end screens replaced YouTube annotations which had been previously used to include links and calls-to-action in videos.
How to include links to social media in your email
Email marketing systems often come with a module or setting to quickly add social media follow or sharing links to any email.
In Constant Contact, while in the edit mode of a content block, click the “Social” tab from the tools and then select the channels you’d like to include and add your social media profile URLs to each. To add sharing icons, simply select the checkbox in the header options to include a standard set of icons.
In MailChimp, the process is just as easy. Simply drag the content item from the right pane to your email and then configure the style and URLs for each.
Other email systems such as MyEmma, VerticalResopnse, and Aweber offer similar, easy-to-add and easy-to-configure methods of including social media features in your email campaigns.
Another way to integrate social media with your email is to include “click to tweet” links in your email content. Click to Tweet allows you to compose a tweet you’d like people to share and generates a unique URL or link for your tweet.
You can then add that URL to your email to help users easily share content directly from the email.
When a user clicks on the link in the email, it will open a tweet composition window with your precomposed tweet that the user can share to his or her followers with a simple click or edit to their liking.
Better Together
Email remains popular and profitable. Social media has the power to reach leads and customers. Used together, they can amplify your marketing efforts and provide a consistent experience for users across channels. Creating avenues or connections between strategies and channels reinforces brand messaging and strengthens recognition. It also create a more holistic experience for people interacting with your brand or company wherever they are and however they encounter you.
