Reaching Your Subscriber Through Social Media Integration
It’s here to stay, and it’s growing by the day. You know what’s coming, don’t you? Of course you do: It’s social media! But even as social media continues to grow in popularity and effectiveness, email marketing can play along! In fact, as the social sphere expands, so too should your email marketing best practices. There are many ways to expand your email marketing best practices to incorporate social media within your email marketing campaigns, and we’ve written about five of them.
But today, I was revisiting a MarketingSherpa article on ways to leverage the influence of social reinforcement within email marketing, as I am still not seeing it used very much in the email marketing messages that populate my inbox. I have to wonder why, since there are so many interesting and even exciting ways to integrate social into email marketing.
But by enhancing your email marketing messages using interactive technology, your email campaigns can become a new addition to the social media landscape, not to mention a stand out from the rest of the email marketing messages out there.
The MarketingSherpa article discusses several new and innovative tactics for leveraging social media within email. Three of these that especially resonate with us, when considering how to best integrate social media into an effective email marketing campaign, are the following:
1) Choose an appropriate goal: While social reinforcement doesn’t make sense for every campaign or product, it can be quite powerful for the right goal, for example: you want to complement and grow your social media efforts.
2) Become a participant in the conversation: As an email marketer, you’re undoubtedly used to controlling the conversation. But when you’ve decided to include social reinforcement to your email marketing mix, you’ve also chosen to become more transparent. And, as MarketingSherpa says, “with transparency comes risk.” It’s time to shift the focus from control to participation. As a participant, you want to understand what’s being said about your brand or product. And that can only lead to better email marketing campaigns, and ultimately, better email ROI. Because you’re essentially gathering data when you increase transparency and encourage conversation from your subscribers.
3) Choose the method of social reinforcement: Interactivity lets you dynamically update emails with responses from your audience, or those who influence them. Whether you integrate Facebook contacts, incorporate live feeds from Twitter or blogs, or dynamically update emails with responses, you’re increasing the interactivity and dynamic nature of your email marketing messages significantly. Integrating Facebook contacts is a truly innovative way to leverage the power of social influence into your email marketing campaigns. As MarketingSherpa puts it, “You can include code that allows recipients to see which of their Facebook friends have purchased the deal. Each time recipients open the email, they can view the latest updates.” And we are all learning the power of social influence: the more our friends “like” something and share about it, the more inclined we are to also “like” or purchase the same thing.
For more on how to integrate social into your email marketing campaign, or otherwise design dynamic messages, call on ClickMail!
About the Author: Sharon
