In France, whenever the king died and his heir took the crown, people would chant: “The king is dead! Long live the king!” Marketers reacted similarly the day they were finally ready to discard email in favour of social media in their online strategies. It was a relief to everyone, and the start of something very exciting in the marketing sphere. However, as the new king set court, it was soon apparent that social media marketing would be a fussy, unpredictable ruler, changing its mind frequently, and leaving its courtiers wondering what it was they’d done wrong?
And guess who was there to help pick up the slack. The old and faithful king, the email, was called back out of retirement.
Some marketers refused to accept that you could teach an old dog new tricks, but it wasn’t long before they had to accept there was simply no way to eliminate email from a robust online marketing strategy. The old guard was here to stay.
However, that’s not to say you can’t teach an old dog to work alongside the new dogs in the pack. There have been developments in making peace between the advocates of social media and those of email: what if both are right? What if the most solid marketing strategy involves social media and email, working together to deliver the best results? Today we will discuss this precise situation – where email and social media can intersect, and help to improve your lead generation and sales efforts. Working together, they can actually accomplish this in ways in which either of them on its own would not be able to.
These are the top five ways in which you can achieve this kind of synergy, for maximum benefits:
1. Encourage Subscribers to Promote Your Content via “Share With Your Network”
Share with your network (SWYN) is one of the best ways in which you can maximise the reach of your email newsletter content. By offering your subscribers quick links to share your content across various social media platforms, you turn each customer who follows through into your own brand advocate. Each shared story or piece of content is not just able to reach more people than you could with a standard mailing list, but also comes with an implicit endorsement from the person sharing it. The act of sharing is a statement: “I like this, I tried this, and I am confident in recommending this item to you.”
2. Use Social Media as an Alternative to Email Newsletters
One way of not losing the attention of people who no longer open your emails and respond to calls to action is to invite them to connect with you on social media, instead. This kind of invitation can be sent to people who consistently do not interact with your business via newsletters for a period of time (it is up to you to determine this threshold). Alternatively, you can include the invitation in the landing page people are taken to after they unsubscribe from your emails.
3. Promote Social Media Contests Using Email
A contest is the more exciting option available to you, as it implies more participants. One of the keys for the success of social media contests is maximum promotion and exposure to all potential participants you are able to reach. Thus, you should always create an email campaign promoting your contests, describing the prizes, and inviting your subscribers to join in and to invite their contacts to join as well. In this way you achieve two important goals: making your own subscribers aware of the contest and reaching out to more people, who are not in your mailing list yet.
4. Promote Your Newsletters on Social Media
One the best ways of getting more subscribers for your email newsletters is offering peek previews of the goodies and making people want to read more. Many successful bloggers use this tactic in order to gain more subscribers, and it has been proven to be a successful strategy. If it works for bloggers it will certainly work for your business, so long as your content is original, interesting, and useful to your readers.
5. Include Social Streams in Your Emails
Email is a great medium to offer your subscribers a quick overview of what is going on in your social media channels. Social media streams embedded in emails are an engaging tactic to get people to join the conversation. We accomplish this by sharing or commenting on social media posts, as part of the email itself. This works especially for that portion of your followers who are too busy to spend a lot of time on social media. In this way, they don’t miss anything of interest and can interact with you at their own leisure.
As you can see, social media and email don’t have to be sworn marketing enemies. Instead, they can become your strongest assets in your mission to reach more prospects and qualified leads. All you have to do is get them to work together.