Are you effectively using social media & email marketing together?

Did you know that email marketing has one of the highest ROI in the marketing industry? It’s true, the average ROI of email marketing is 3800%, which equates to 38$ of revenue generated for every 1$ spent on an email marketing campaign. That’s a huge ROI, so it’s no wonder that email marketing is the proverbial king of the marketing world. Email marketing campaigns have been successful because they get recipients to take action, engage with your business, and get you more leads and sales.

The very first email was sent back in the 1970s and since then, emails have reached an unprecedented level of scope and influence. Even though email has been the ruler for a while now, it’s not the only player in town. Social media marketing has proven itself to be a great marketing channel for growing your audience.

Facebook alone allows marketers to tap into hundreds of different audiences through advanced Facebook targeting strategies. Combining both the targeting abilities of social media to find new audiences and capture their email with the power of email marketing is a huge opportunity that a lot of people don’t take advantage of right now.

5 techniques for combining social media & email marketing to get the most out of your future marketing campaigns

1. Make sure your branding is aligned across email and social media

First things first, you need to make sure your branding has a consistent appearance across both email and social media campaigns. This does not mean they have to look exactly the same, but that they should channel the same attitude and ethos you want to associate with your business.

Bottom line…

Pay close attention to your brand language, attitude and overall message you deliver on social media and email campaigns. If customers receive conflicting images and messages between email and social media campaigns, it will leave a bad taste in their mouths and make them think your brand lacks authenticity. Ultimately, this will impact your brand reputation and customer conversion rates.

Just like in the example below, Qatar Airways is speaking the same brand language across email newsletters and social media using ‘like never before’’ expression as part of their brand identity.

2. Use social media as a tool to grow your email list

Many companies fall into the bad habit of running social media campaigns while neglecting their most important asset: email lists.

First, it is hard to see exactly how all those Facebook likes and Twitter mentions affect your bottom line unless you have access to individual users’ inboxes.

Second, any social media platform like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest reserve the right to suspend or delete your account for whatever reason they want, and without any warning or explanation. If that does happen and you haven’t bothered to build your email list, you will lose all contact with your audience that you’ve worked so hard to cultivate.

Bottom line here: Don’t forget to keep building your email list in tandem with your social media ventures. Just like BirchBox in the example below, they run a monthly subscription box and do a great job making their social media audience curious about an offer they send exclusively to their email subscribers. It makes their social media followers want to sign up for their newsletter to see what’s inside the latest subscription box.

Another great way to use social media to grow your email list is to trial social media ads to bring visitors to your site and use gated content. Essentially, gated content is website content that won’t reveal itself until a visitor puts in their email address. Other ideas include hosting contests and giveaways that require entrants to give their email address to apply.

The basic rule here is that you want to regularly interact with your audience in social media and trial some of the techniques mentioned above to build your email list. The ROI will be more than worth it.

3. Use your email list to grow your social media audience

In the same way, you can use your social media accounts to bolster your email list, you can also use your email list to boost social media engagement with your brand. Here is a simple example backed by some case studies: simply add “follow us” buttons to each of your social media pages in your email blasts. The fast-food chain Chick-Fil-A tried this simple technique to promote its Facebook pages and saw their Facebook engagement grow from 25,000 fans to over 1 million in just a year. See? It doesn’t have to be complicated. Sometimes all you need is a big bright button that literally says what you want customers to do.

Just like in the example below, Mr. Supplements, an online Fitness Supplement company included their social buttons in one of their newsletters.

Other cool ideas to boost social media engagement includes sending your email list content from your social media pages in emails, adding share buttons, and adding links to pages in email signatures. Again, the key thing here is to make sure you engage the customer on a personal level and specifically ask them to do something, be it a click on a button or visit a web page.

4. Create a lead-generating Facebook ad

Facebook gives you the option to create ads that allow people to quickly share basic info with you in exchange for something, this could be a free eBook or pdf resource. These lead-generating Facebook ads are a great way to attract followers from social media to your email list.

For example, you can create an ad with a compelling offer such as a PDF checklist in your areas of expertise and to receive the PDF, people would need to enter their email. It’s simple, yet highly effective way to quickly grow your email list.

 5. Upload your email list to social networks

Last but not least, one of the best ways to ensure the integration of your email and social media audiences is to upload your email subscriber list directly to Facebook. This way you can use a neat Lookalike Audience program that matches existing visitors to find new leads. You can specify the demographics, interests, behaviors, and values common in your intended audience so you can make sure your ad sees the “right” people.

Uploading your subscriber email list lets you target those specific people with your ads afterward. That way you can be sure you are reaching those individuals on two fronts.

By the same token, you can upload your email subscriber list to Twitter for a similar effect. Uploading your email list to Twitter lets you create a tailored audience that is directly targeted with your ad campaigns. You can also modify your campaigns to focus on specific target demographics.

Bonus Tip

One last thing that can affect your social media campaigns is whether the posts you use are paid promotions or “organic.” The current state of research seems to suggest that for high ROI activities like lead generation, paid social media fairs pretty well, whereas organic social media might be better suited for campaigns focused on customer engagement or brand awareness.

Integrating social media and email marketing strategies is a potent way to drastically increase the ROI on your different marketing campaigns. As the dominance of the internet and social media continues to increase. Combining email and social media marketing campaigns will likely become even more integrated with one another and it’s something marketers should be using to reach their target audiences.

If you want to learn more on this topic, view our on-demand webinar 11 Strategies to Grow Your Business with Email & Social Media.