How to Balance Social Media and Email Marketing Strategies
Of all the connective technologies that businesses regularly use, the two that have had the greatest impact on the way that we communicate have been email and social media. First to the game, email set the stage for instantaneous communication and the sharing of information. A few years later, social media created a connective web of accounts that haven’t been matched since.
Social media is drawing in billions of users from all over the globe. Yet, even with this connective web that binds us all, email communication is still incredibly common. In fact, around 4.4 billion people send an email every single day. With these titans existing in the same world, how can businesses manage both audiences to strike an effective balance?
In this article, we’ll dive into the world of social media and email marketing strategies, exploring methods of using both in a complementary manner. Let’s dive right in.
Top Tactics To Use These Two Spheres in Tandem
Both social media and email marketing are two vital fields, each of which brings a unique selection of customers, communication styles, and customer-facing functions to your business. One is not inherently more important than another, making it pertinent to use both in tandem.
Here are three phenomenal strategies to connect email and social media marketing.
Email Signatures
Email signatures are one of the most underutilized aspects of email communication. While people do employ email signatures, they often fail to realize the full scope of what this supplementary technology can offer to users.
Email signatures do much more than just share personal details about the sender of the email. On the contrary, one of the most effective ways of using email signatures is actually as a point of connection to social media accounts and other business-owned pages.
In an email signature, alongside all of the information like names, titles, and contact information, businesses can include links to each social media account that they have a presence on. This has several benefits for companies and customers:
- Instant access: Users can click on your website or social media pages to rapidly encounter other active accounts, streamlining access to social media and boosting click-through rates.
- Authenticity: By providing a selection of social media accounts, businesses can demonstrate that they have a legitimate presence. Especially for cold emailing, this can provide a layer of authenticity, which can improve first contact with new customers.
- Connection: Above all, connecting email and social media will inspire anyone who is currently an email subscriber to head to your social accounts, which can boost follower count and increase brand visibility.
Considering how easy it is to start adding an Outlook signature to your accounts, this is a phenomenal strategy that only takes a few minutes to execute.
Use Social Media To Generate New Email Subscribers
While both social media and email spheres are important to a business, one routinely has a higher ROI than the other. Email marketing, due to the fact that people have to go through more effort to sign up for your mailing list, typically has a much higher ROI than all forms of social media marketing.
However, it is often much easier to cultivate an audience on social media, making this a vital first touchpoint with users. By cultivating a following on social media, which is easier to do, you can begin to feed those followers into your email subscriber list. One of the best cross-over methods to do this is to run a contest or click-through campaign.
These strategies converge on one factor – rewarding people who sign up for your mailing list. A contest is by far the best method of doing this as it allows you to gain a large number of new subscribers without having to actually reward every single one.
If you have a high-value contest, where you offer your services or products to the contest winner, you’ll inspire your social media audiences to list their name on your mailing list. After all, simply putting your email down is never much of a demand, and when there is a possibility to earn money from doing so, users are highly motivated.
Approaching contests on social media will provide maximum visibility, bringing new subscribers to your mailing list where you can then hit them with cultivated content that you’ve used data-driven tinkering to perfect. Over time, your email subscribers can provide a higher ROI, effectively returning the initial investment you made in the contest to get people onto your list.
These two technologies perfectly feed into one another, helping your business thrive while balancing both spheres.
Use Email As a Testing Ground
One of the major benefits of building up a larger audience of email subscribers is that you’re able to access an entire testing audience for important social media posts. Whenever you’re launching a new project or presenting a new idea to your audience, you can use email as a testing ground.
By segmenting your audience into smaller sectors, you can send our varying announcements using different graphics and copy. Over time, by looking at your email analytics, you’ll be able to understand which user groups showed a higher level of engagement in certain styles. After you’ve gone through the process of honing these announcements, you’ll rapidly be able to find the best method of launching this new announcement.
Not only does this ensure that email subscribers receive news ahead of other audiences, which will build brand loyalty, but it also means that when you do launch on social apps, your post will be received with greater attention.
Consistently launching impressive posts on your social media, after testing in email, will make your online presence stand out and help generate new followers and customers.
Final Thoughts
Social media and email marketing are both vital in the world of business. Without either of these connective technologies, users cannot get in contact with companies and create an ongoing dialogue. Even more important, a loss of one of these technologies serves a company’s connection to potentially millions of clients, reducing business authority and crippling growth.
Instead of taking an all-or-nothing approach to these two fields of marketing, businesses should strive to find tactics that combine both in tandem. Over time, by focusing on leveraging one method against another, companies can rapidly expand, reach new customers, and keep regular customers informed.
In tandem, social media and email marketing are a powerful combination that all businesses should be using.
Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.
