You may feel torn about where to spend your energy – email marketing or social media. But ideally, you must use both methods to support each other and achieve the greatest success. Marketers have the greatest opportunity to reach consumers when they view social media and email marketing as partners with a common goal, rather than rely entirely on one over the other.
Email marketing remains effective because of its opportunities for personalization. Email allows marketers to segment and target different audiences, as well as deliver highly relevant and customized messages to specific contacts. Social media, on the other hand, delivers the same content to all followers, regardless of location or demographic.
Email also allows you to control when messages are received, and who received them. But with social media, brands are at the mercy of the algorithm, and you have no say in when followers will exactly get your content.
Social media has its own advantages, however. Apart from paid ads, social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, and more are essentially free. So if you are already seeing a profit from customers’ social media engagement, the ROI is clearly significant.
The immediacy of social media also allows you to take advantage of trending topics. The sharing capabilities of social media also means your content could quickly be sent to many more eyeballs than you originally aimed for.
Social media practices can certainly inform how to improve your email marketing. Email marketing can take advantage of current events just as much as social media. Using subject lines pegged to timely topics may cause recipients to stop and click on a message that they otherwise would have been deleted. Viewers might not be expecting something so topical heading to their email, so take advantage of this.
Information captured from social media-based email subscriptions can also help to craft the most effective email content for new contacts. For instance, if an email subscriber found your site through Instagram, you may want to target them with messages featuring images. Your social media demographic can tell you a lot about your customer base, and what types of content they respond well to.
Social media and email marketing must be used in partnership, as each can grow the other. Your emails should send your readers to social media pages, and social posts should direct visitors to email subscriptions.
It’s essential that email marketers include links to social pages at the bottom of every email, regardless if it’s a welcome email, a promotional email or any other type of message. The more often email recipients see a brand’s social links, the more likely they are to visit those social pages directly from the email and keep the brand’s social presence top of mind.
Social media posts should also direct visitors to email sign-up landing pages. Sending them to the home page is not enough, as it may distract the viewer and they’ll end up exiting before singing up for your email list. Instead, social posts should link back to squeeze pages — landing pages specifically meant to capture email opt-ins. These pages should have very simple content with a clear call to action: Sign up to receive emails.
Social media and email marketing must work hand in hand in hand for the best results. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, contact GiraffeBuilder for a consultation!
