A Comprehensive Guide to Social Media and Email Marketing Integration

emailMore than half of the world’s population have accounts on social media, and approximately the same number use emails. Both channels contribute significantly to the effectiveness of the promotional strategy, but when marketers put them together, a company gets a combo for opportunities to address the target audience.

Benefits of social media and email marketing integration

Online communication has long surpassed live talks in popularity, with more and more people using chats or video conferencing tools rather than meeting in offline facilities. You can hardly find a person who doesn’t have a profile on Facebook or Instagram and at least one valid email address. And for marketers, this fact means – by aligning their promotional efforts across communication channels, they can bring more qualified clients to the company with fewer efforts.

For business, successful integration of Email Marketing and Social Media Marketing results in:

• more options for building brand awareness among target audiences
• higher paces of obtaining followers and email subscribers
• reduced content costs thanks to its recycling
• reduced labor expenses due to automation of content distribution
• better opportunities to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

Companies that align multi-channel lead generation can assure consistency of their external communications, which is especially important on the B2B market.

How to integrate email marketing with social media?

There are 2 prerequisites for successful alignment of newsletters with activities on socials – a unified and structured leads database and assisting software. Having both, you can nurture leads on their buying journey – from the very first moment they hear about a brand to after-sales service. Moreover, companies that generate leads via multiple channels can boost revenues thanks to an opportunity to sell to in-market audiences.

Build email lists using social media

Prospects’ profiles can tell much about their interests and concerns. If you work on the B2B, professional social networks, like Crunchbase or Clutch, are the right point to start compiling email databases. Here, aside from firmographics, you can check out recent news, e.g. M&As announcements or new product launches, and use these insights to write engaging emails.

You can improve contact list by using publicly available data from social networks and professional listings, image source: a snapshot from Crunchbase.com

To collect followers’ contacts, use email-finding programs. These will browse public profiles and extract contacts in seconds. Moreover, the best tools will also verify findings so that you don’t get non-existing or misspelled emails in the database. You can also browse profiles for contact information manually. Although this takes more time, it may work well in the case of B2B clients.

Upload a list of subscribers to social networks

Social platforms offer an option to search for leads’ profiles and address them in bulk. To do so, upload a list of emails to these social networks and target people with ads. Or – find lookalike audiences and extend the basis for reaching out.

Import email list into Facebook and set up ads to retarget users, image source: blog.artstorefronts.com

Include links to social profiles in emails

This may be advantageous in two ways. A competent-looking feed and thousands of followers on LinkedIn or Medium can testify to the trustworthiness of a company and convince new clients that they can do business with it.

Second, links to social profiles in emails allow increasing the number of followers. For example, you can share interesting content in newsletters and encourage recipients to continue reading in your corporate profiles.

Ask social media followers subscribing to your newsletters

There’s no law against increasing the number of subscribers through socials, as well. You can launch lead generation campaigns and encourage people to share their contacts and other personal details in exchange for some benefit, for example, a one-off discount or a free consultation.

The only thing is – to inform subscribers on how your company will use the data and mention they will be able to unsubscribe from newsletters at any point.

Invite your email subscribers to a private invite-only Facebook group

When a membership is restricted, it becomes a matter of prestige for customers. If you work on the B2B, you can create an exclusive virtual “community” where only selected professionals can participate. Consequently, you can encourage people to subscribe to your newsletters, offering them exclusive access to your closed group.

Recycle content

One of the benefits you can obtain from omnichannel communication is an opportunity to reuse good content and, hence, decrease marketing costs. For example, if you film tutorials and share them on YouTube, you can use a sound sequence from them and create podcasts or “How-To” articles. After, you can share these in newsletters or broadcast on specialized platforms, like Spotify or others.

Content reusing allows you to assure the target audience won’t pass by essential information. If a person has missed an important announcement in your Facebook group, you can play it safe and share the message via email, as well. Companies can go even further and create text message marketing campaigns for their social media messaging.

Run contests

In addition to email, social media provides vast opportunities to engage people with your brand through contests. Giveaways and other promo activities can create a buzz over your company in the digital space and make people who’ve never heard about the brand interested in it.

If you have few followers, you should look for partnerships with influencers to run the contest. To choose the right bloggers, compare their audience and engagement ratios. You can also skim through previously published content – to assume whether the person fits your brand or not.

There are two essential things about contests – rules and promotion. Make sure to disclose all relevant terms, such as age or territory restrictions, and invite people to participate via giveaway sites, promotional blog posts, Facebook Ads, Reddit, and other platforms.

Use a reward-based referral marketing strategy

A good brand reputation and an “army” of loyal customers is your asset. So, don’t hesitate to use these to grow the number of subscribers and followers. Encourage satisfied clients to share their positive experiences with mates or family by rewarding them generously. You can combine monetary incentives, e.g. referral bonuses, with non-monetary ones.

Sync email marketing and social media calendars

To reach the audience with the right message and at the right time, align content distribution. One of the most reliable ways to do this is – to synchronize editorial schedules and arrange publication dates across channels.

You can create sync calendars in Excel, but it’s better to use special tools like CoSchedule, Percolate, or Kapost.

You can find social media by email or do vice versa and benefit from higher audience coverage and reduced promotional costs. So, don’t struggle about what marketing channel to choose – email vs social media. Align them and integrate both into a comprehensive digital marketing strategy.