Email Marketing Meets Social Media
by James Shaw and Amelia Penner Every business has a few "raving fans". These people are usually cherished individuals who talk about our company or group in such a nice way that more people become customers. This article is all about empowering raving fans! Hook up your social media accounts into your email blasts and you'll allow more sharing, recommending and commenting. Free PR anyone? ;-) Let me ask you a question assuming that you use email marketing and social media. Are they separate in your company's mind or do you make sure to bring them together? As a company it can get tiresome dealing with email marketing and social media separately. Why have two separate audiences when you can bring them together in one?
Grow Your Audience
The easiest way to connect the two is to make sure that your audiences know about both your email newsletter and your social media. On your email newsletters add your latest Facebook post or tweet to your sidebar. Or you can add the logos in your footer with links to your pages. Using your Facebook Fan Page you can easily add a newsletter signup box and on Twitter, you can tweet the link to your newsletter signup. By doing this you can easily expand your email database and social media followers.
Cross-Posting
Constant Contact allows for a handy feature when you send out your newsletter. You will be asked if you want to tweet this newsletter and you can choose yes or no. By choosing to tweet the newsletter a tweet will be sent out through your company's Twitter account with the title of the newsletter and a link to the web version. This allows for your newsletter to be retweeted by your audience and get more people interested in what your company has to say.
Tips and Tricks
Here are some simple tips you can implement right away to engage your email database and social media audience. Do you want to inspire a conversation? Write a question in the sidebar of your newsletter and encourage people to answer it via Facebook or Twitter. Or you could use survey tools like Survey Monkey and Poll Daddy. This could be a great way to get customer feedback for your business.
Want more interactions on Facebook? Mention in your newsletter and your social media accounts that the 15th person to post their best experience with your company on your Facebook wall will receive a prize.Want more interactions on Twitter? Ask your audience an industry-related trivia question. Make it fun! Remember that Twitter is faster paced than Facebook so keep the comments/questions time-sensitive. Don't forget to comment and re-tweet (RT) other peoples' tweets. JOIN in the conversations already happening!
Want more ideas to expand your audience and increase engagement? Contact us today to set up an integrated marketing campaign that is the perfect fit for your business!