Combining social media and email is a great way to bolster your marketing potential.
Using either of these channels on their own makes for an effective marketing strategy. But if you combine the two, you will amplify the strengths of each while diminishing their weaknesses.
According to Statista, global email users are numbered around 3.9 billion in 2020 whereas count on social media population is around 3.2 billion.
With all that being said, if you want to leverage the combined power of email and social media, you need to know how to integrate them properly. You can’t just use random techniques from each domain and hope they somehow sync up.
So to help you leverage the benefits of email-social marketing alignment, we compiled a list of tactics that combine both channels to great effect.
1. Reuse Content Between Channels
The one thing that social media and email marketing have in common is their reliance on the content. If you treat email and social as isolated channels, you will have to create exclusive content for each. However, this would be costly and time-consuming.
What you can do instead is reuse your existing content from one channel on the other. For example, you can publish an infographic you’ve made for a social media post in your weekly newsletter. Or you can use your email sales copy for a social media ad.
This will cut your content production costs by half while leveraging the benefits of publishing content on two separate channels. You will also improve your brand consistency by keeping your two content streams aligned.
2. Adopt a Common Strategy for Both Channels
Social and email are different marketing channels in terms of how they function, but not in terms of their desired outcomes. The goal of both is to get people invested in your brand and convert them at some point down the line. And to ensure that both channels are equally viable, you need to make them consistent with each other.
Adopting a common strategy for both is therefore integral for their success. In practice, this means that you should create a single unified document describing the goals to be achieved, and the means to be used.
A good place to start is to create a unified content calendar. This will ensure that your email subscribers get notified about events, sales, and content updates at the same time as your social media followers.
3. Test Your Social Media Ad Copy via Email
Organic reach is at an all-time low on social media, which means you have to use built-in ad support to attract new followers to your channel. However, running ads cost money, and if you don’t optimize your ad copy properly, you will get a negative ROI. It would be a huge boon if you could test your copy performance beforehand. And thanks to email, you can.
The main strength of email marketing is that it’s extremely cheap. It costs nothing to send an email, and you can easily track how effective it is at converting customers. This means that you can try a few copy variations to find the best one.
You can then use this copy for your social media ads. This approach is much safer and cost-effective than trying out different ad copies directly on social media.
4. Add Subscribe CTAs to Your Social Media Profile
Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter have built-in features for collecting user emails. This allows you to expand your email subscriber list directly through your social media profile. We will cover one example, that of Facebook Call-to-Action Ads.
As shown in the image above, Facebook has a feature called the Call-to-Action Ad. To use it, you need to go to the Promotions menu on your profile, add a call-to-action button, and then add an email sign-up form to it.
5. Add Social CTAs to Your Emails
Likewise, you can use your emails to promote your social media profile. This is one of the least intrusive methods of expanding your following on social media. And one with a potentially massive reach, depending on the size of your subscriber list.
The easiest way to nudge people into following you on social media is to provide social media CTA icons in your email signature. It takes no effort, and people will immediately understand the CTA’s purpose.
Another way would be to ask your recipients for likes and subscribes as a part of your email copy. Try offering them a freebie such as a piece of content in exchange for taking your CTA.
6. Create a Social Media Contest and Ask for Emails
You can take the idea from the last section even further by hosting a social media contest. The logic remains the same – give your social media followers the option to gain something in exchange for their email address.
For instance, you can ask your followers on Instagram to submit funny images related to your brand. Everyone likes to be seen as a funny guy, so this strategy is sure to bring you many emails.
Another option would be to host a giveaway on social media. This has the advantage of offering a more tangible benefit to your followers.
7. Combine Subscriber Data With Social Media Data
Data lies at the core of digital marketing, email and social media included. The more data you have on your subscribers and followers, the better equipped you are to convert them. And by opting to use email and social media in tandem, you gain the opportunity to cross-pollinate your customer data. You can make use of the best digital marketing tools for this.
You can upload your email list in CSV form to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks to find your subscribers’ profiles. You can then target these profiles with ads to gain more social media followers.
Conversely, if you take the time to explore your social media followers, you will learn more about needs, wants, and desires. This will allow you to write more convincing email copies.
8. Leverage Social Proof With Social Media Testimonials
Social media represents a great source of user feedback for your business. Social media users can leave reviews on your profile page, post comments on your posts, and even express their feelings about your business through emoticons.
If you manage to acquire a lot of positive feedback, you can use it as social proof to convince your email subscribers to convert. There is a stark difference between a sales pitch that says “buy our products”, and “buy our products, because we have a proven track record of customer satisfaction”.
In practical terms, you can leverage social proof by providing links to your social media profile page, showing excerpts from social media reviews, or posting screenshots of your comment section.
9. Treat Unsubscribes as an Opportunity
This is one of the more niche tactics on our list. It leverages the fact that you can customize your email unsubscribe page. The idea here is that you can salvage some unsubscribers by pointing them to your social media profile.
The reason why this works is because everyone’s reason for unsubscribing from your emails can be different. Some people don’t find your content valuable, others feel inundated with constant updates, but there are also those that simply don’t like to interact with brands via email.
This last group might be more inclined to follow you on social media instead. Give them the option to do so by mentioning that they can follow your brand on other platforms once they’ve successfully unsubscribed from your list.
10. Utilize Social Media Email Notifications
Another niche tactic for getting your email copy in front of as many people as possible is by leveraging posts in social media groups. The secret behind this tactic is the fact that people tend to receive email notifications about posts in groups they follow.
What this means is that if you post content in these groups, there’s a good chance it will reach users outside your actual mailing list. This allows you to deliver email content without actually asking people to share their email.
In effect, what you’re doing is turning your social media posts into email content that gets freely delivered.
11. CRM to Keep it All Together
As you’ve seen, in order to successfully combine email and social media you will need to do a lot of juggling between the two. This presents a significant barrier to social-email marketing adoption, but one which can be surpassed with CRM software.
CRM software can help you combine email and social media by keeping all your customer data in a central repository. This makes it easier to combine data from multiple sources, implement and monitor marketing campaigns, and share information among team members.
CRM also allows you to utilize features such as automatic email integration. The software will automatically capture your inbound and outbound emails and store them in your activities tab, so you can keep track of progress for each of your leads.
The Combined Might of Social Media and Email
We hope that we’ve successfully demonstrated that social media and email have a lot more in common than you previously thought. Each of the two channels has features that enable it to combine with the other for improved effectiveness. Start using them today, and take your digital marketing efforts to the next level.
