Social Media Marketing Book

Posts Tagged ‘email newsletters’

There’s a lot of ins and outs when it comes to social media marketing.  One of the biggest pieces to success with when you are planning your social media strategy is knowing how to integrate other marketing types in with your social media strategy.  Integration with other disciplines further enhances the reach of what each of your chosen tactics is attempting to do.  One of the easiest and more successful ways to promote your interactions in social media is via email.

I wrote about Email Can Be Social Media’s Best Friend a few weeks ago on ClickZ, and I still point back to how easy it is for people to share via email the content they find valuable.  As much as they are sharing on Twitter and Facebook, people share in emails – probably even more so, as the level of comfort with sending an email is a lot higher due to how its been integrated into our societies.  eMarketer has a piece today about integrating social media with email showing the different kinds of tactics companies are planning to do with integrating social media with email, only just under 13% of the companies surveyed aren’t integrating email and social media in some way.

So how can you get a quick start on integrating your existing email list with what your implementing in social media?

5 Quick Tips for Integrating Social Media & Email

• Make Special Announcements Early To Your Email List, Then to Your Communities

  There’s a reason people sign up for your email lists.  They want “in on the ground floor” or they want to be the first to know what’s going on with you, and want to be the first one’s to propagate that information you relate.  People who are subscribing willingly, not those people who forget to uncheck the box when they buy something from you, want to know everything that’s going on with you, your company, your brands, your services or products before anyone else, so use that to your advantage.  Make special announcements to your email list early and then to your communities a day or two later.  If you are consistent with this, you’re fan base is going to notice and catch on and you’ll soon have more additions to your email list if they want the information first.

• Use Twitter & Facebook

  Its a two way street with Twitter & Facebook, meaning promotion can work for both, in both mediums.  On all your email communications, if you have a Twitter Account or a Facebook Fanpage promote it!  On your Facebook Fanpage, make it easy for your fans to sign up for your newsletter.  When your newest email newsletter goes out to the list, promote it on Twitter, and when it goes live on your site make sure you post the link in your active social media communities.  Remember that just because you and your marketing team know you have all these ways to communicate, your audience members and interested fans and customers probably don’t.  Let them know!

• Offer Sneak Peeks to Email Lists Subscribers

  Make your email list feel extra special by offering them limited time “first crack” at a special offer before it goes out to the general public.  Make sure they know it too by promoting in ways such as “before we release this to our Facebook Fans or Twitter Community we’d like to give you, our loyal email followers, first crack at our special promotion”.  Make sure though that you do place that same promotion out in Facebook, Twitter or the other social media communities after that limited time engagement because your email subscribers are savvy, there’s a very high chance they aren’t just following you with emails, but on your other social media channels as well.  Your email subscribers will stand up and take notice and pass around the word that you truly do reward your email community in a special way to their own network of friends.

• Turn Your Email Newsletters PDFs and Submit to Scribd

  It may sound like a very simple, “no brainer” type of thing to do, but many companies forget that their newsletters that are sent through email can be very valuable content that they can leverage in social media communities.  By turning your email newsletters into a PDF and placing it on your website, you get the benefit of the search engines finding and ranking the content, you also get the benefit that your PDF can then be shared across many other social channels.  You can also start your own account on Scribd and share your PDF newsletter to that community as well.

• Make It Easy to Share Your Email Content

  Even within your email newsletters make sure that the content you provide there is easily sharable.  Add “retweet”, “share on facebook”, “email to a friend” buttons and graphics to your content.  Of course, don’t go overboard and make your email newsletter or content be overtaken by the buttons!  Make sure where you are suggesting to share the content makes sense to your own audience.  Are they using Twitter?  Would Delicious be a better choice?  If you’re on the email team, talking to your social media marketing team before randomly selecting buttons would be a better use of your time so you can correctly target where your company wants your content shared.