How Social Media & Email Marketing Fold Together for Best Output

Submitted by Jignesh on Tuesday, 24 July 2012No Comment

You might say social networking is the new black when it comes to driving traffic to a website and building up a customer base. Email marketing provides a powerful tool to keep people interested in your brand. Most companies understand how crucial ecommerce and online advertising is to their growth potential, but learning how to fold these two potent technologies together is a little more complicated.

Spread the Word

One of the key advantages to social networking is the friend factor. In the days before computers became king, a small handful of buddies might meet once or twice a week at the local coffee house or bar. Now days, a couple of friends getting together has become hundreds of acquaintances interacting online. Facebook has over 400 million active users and most of them have over a hundred friends. Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter allow people to spread the word when they find a business, service or website that they like. In fact, they can like you and every one of their friends and followers know it instantly.

Bringing Email into the Plan

Integrating social media into your next email campaign has the potential to raise the click-rates dramatically. We live in a world that responds to visual stimuli. An email that has a “share this” button is going to provoke a click from readers 30 percent more often than your basic link, according to BizReport. Think about the candy rack at the grocery or convenience store. It’s no accident that retailers fill up the areas around the checkout with sweets. Placing the candy where you wait sublimely entices impulse purchasing. Putting a button inside an email promotes a similar impulse response.

Social media buttons in emails work to get a reader’s attention. If a customer or subscriber finds the information in the email engaging, they are likely to make use of a share button if it is sitting right in front of them.

Share Buttons

Tweet this, like this email, share this with friends – these are all call to action encouragements that prompt readers to alert followers and friend about what they see. Most social networking sites offer free graphics that you can use in multiple size options. Just upload the button image to your blog or website and copy and paste the snippet of code provided into the email layout.

Another option is to place the code into your email signature. The basic steps are the same; you just use the email client to create the signature instead of embedding the code into a template. Look for a share button and embed code on all the major networking sites including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+ and Tumblr.

BizzReport calls social networking and email marketing a symbiotic relationship. Adding more followers to the Facebook page leads to email subscribers, which in turn creates more share responses that adds followers to your Facebook page. The two tasks feed each other. Adding social networking share buttons is a free way to increase the click-through rate and build a successful email campaign.