Drive Leads and Sales by Combining Social Media and Email Marketing

Social media is a powerful marketing tool that most businesses have perfected. Some brands rely entirely on social media, which is their primary marketing channel.

Similarly, email marketing keeps proving to be an effective marketing channel and is still relevant after all these years.

Now imagine combining these two impressive marketing channels into a single explosive marketing strategy. It will mean getting closer to email clients on their socials and starting a new sales email thread with a social media user.

Ready to get started?

Read on to learn more about these two marketing methods’ benefits and how you can integrate them today.

As someone said, through social media, you can reach out to new prospects. However, the easiest way to make them convert is through email marketing which depending on your prospects can be B2B or B2C email marketing.

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Before we dive into the crux of this post, let’s sort out some explanations. Many businesses haven’t enjoyed the benefits of this marketing method because they don’t fully understand it.

Wikipedia refers to social media marketing as “promoting products or services using social networks.” While this definition is straightforward to grasp, it is also quite vague and superficial. 

A better definition of social media marketing would be “an avenue to connect and identify with your target audience via social media.”

This second definition shows that using social media to market goes beyond selling a product or service. It involves building relationships with your audience, which is key to making any sales.

Benefits of Social Media Marketing

Do you know that up to 47% of small businesses still don’t use this marketing method? Why is this so? It is pretty simple. They have no idea what they are losing out on.

Here are some benefits of marketing via social media:

Humanizes the Brand

People don’t want to relate to faceless businesses. They want to build relationships. This is exactly what you achieve when you market via social media.

It helps you to create a face and a voice for your brand. This way, you can show your brand personality to your target audience and communicate effortlessly.

Improves Customer Service

Do you consider using social media a waste of precious time? Well, 67% of individuals try to contact customer care services via social media.

Mind you, that statistic is quite old, so you can bet more people are checking social for the same reason today. Customers aren’t as patient as they used to be, and they need you to respond to requests very quickly. Social media bridges the communication gap and helps you solve problems faster.

Builds Brand Recognition

Customers prefer to patronize brands that they are familiar with. A social media presence puts your brand in the face of customers so that they can recognize it anywhere easily. Better brand recognition results in more conversions for your business.

Attain Authority Status

You can share valuable content via social media to meet the needs of your target audience. Creating such industry-related content helps you attain authority status in your field. This also contributes to your number of conversions.

There are several more benefits of social media marketing but let’s look at email marketing quickly.

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Explaining Email Marketing

Email marketing has been around for quite a long time. It involves the “promotion of products and services via emails.”

This method of marketing also helps brands to establish relationships with prospects. When a company sends an email that isn’t a response to a query or a confirmation, it is email marketing.

It includes anything from newsletters to promoting exclusive deals and even goodwill messages.

This method of marketing presents businesses with a cost-effective channel to reach customers and make conversions. You may use lead generation forms to collect emails and then use them for your email marketing outreach.

Benefits of Email Marketing

Despite being a very old marketing method, using emails to market still comes with loads of benefits. Here are a few of them:

Establishes Authority

Sending out newsletters is an opportunity to share content that establishes your authority in your field. This is very similar to what you have with marketing via social media.

When your subscribers read your emails, they see more reasons to patronize you. This is because your emails are solving their problems and providing knowledge.

Increases Website Traffic

One of the best ways to attract traffic to your website is via email marketing. Include links to your website at different points in your content to redirect traffic.

This way, prospects know that there is more valuable content where this email is coming from. When they visit your website, they are more likely to see reasons to patronize you.

Saves Cost and Time

This is a significant benefit, especially for small businesses that are trying to manage cost and time. Email marketing very affordable, meaning that you don’t need to break the bank for this.

Using this method also means that you are spending less time marketing. You can schedule your emails so that they can go out automatically. This allows you to focus your efforts on other production needs.

Builds Relationships

Like we mentioned earlier, email marketing allows you to build relationships with customers. Good emails hardly go unnoticed and show the personality of your brand.

This allows you to connect with the recipients on a personal level. In the end, it bridges the communication gap that may exist with other forms of marketing.

Integrating Social Media and Email Marketing

When you read through the benefits of social media and email marketing, you’ll notice that they have a lot in common. The similar benefits make it easy to wonder why some marketers think it is a battle between them.

Many digital marketers are noticing that integrating social media marketing with email marketing yields better results. Each method brings something unique to the table and allows you to create more marketing opportunities.

Below are some benefits of integrating social media and email marketing:

Improves Conversion Rate

The ultimate goal of every business is to attract as many conversions as possible. You can achieve this by integrating these two marketing methods.

When you promote your brand via social media, you can gather more emails on your list. This allows you to market your products and services further to get more conversions.

Presents Subscribers with New Platforms for Interaction

Like we mentioned earlier, customers want to communicate with you as much as possible. Your email subscribers may find it difficult to reply to emails. However, it will be more convenient for them to respond via social media.

Integrating both methods means that they have a new channel to interact with your brand. Since they are following you on social, they can get your latest updates and ask questions in real-time.

Customer service software allows any business to improve their customer communication processes as it keeps all messages from various channels in one place. As a result, it saves time and enhances productivity and response times which contribute to greater customer satisfaction.

Amplifies Your Reach

Social media and email integration allow you to extend your brand’s tentacles into several marketing channels. This helps you to amplify your reach so that you can have a wider audience.

We could go on and on with the advantages of integrating social media and email marketing. However, let’s look at how to do this effectively.

Creative Ways to Integrate Social Media with Email Marketing

You should have a better understanding of the effectiveness of social media and email marketing, and the ways you can integrate both. However, it doesn’t just stop right there, you can get a bit more creative with your marketing strategy.

Let’s take a closer look at some creative ways of integrating your social media and email marketing.

Make More Informed Social Media Ad Decisions Using Your Email List

We all know how powerful social media ads are. However, using this method alone is not cost-effective for businesses on a small budget.

Knowing the best call-to-action to use narrows down your choices and makes them more effective. You can achieve this through your email list. If you’re looking for ways to extend your email list, you should check out the list-building sites mentioned in this article.

Make use of email marketing as a means of testing ideas. To do so, sample different subject lines and techniques and see which ones produce the best results.

Now, channel these to social media ads for better results. Take it further with A/B testing based on specific customer groups.

Add Social Media Links to Emails

This is one of the most obvious methods of integrating social media marketing with email marketing. However, you should always add links to each of your social media handles to all your emails.

This will help you grow your reach on social media organically. When subscribers go through your emails frequently, after a while, they want to enjoy more content by clicking the links in the emails to connect with you via their preferred social media platform.

With more followers on social media, you have a wider reach. This means that there is a chance of attracting new prospects and gaining more conversions.

Run Contests

You must be wondering how running contests can help your email marketing. After all, it is majorly a social media strategy.

True, running contests work more on social media. However, you can use it as an avenue to grow your email lists.

One way to do this is to use a call-to-action for your followers with a prize attached. The catch for participation will be subscribing to your email list.

Guess what? You now have a massive collection of social media followers subscribing to your email list. This allows you to take your relationship with them to the next level to improve conversions.

Another idea is to make use of the FOMO effect. Promote the fact that email subscribers will have access to specific exclusive deals. You can bet that your social media followers wouldn’t want to miss out on such deals, so they’ll subscribe.

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Attracting Email Subscriptions Using Social Media

This idea works best on LinkedIn. It helps you to target specific individuals that suit your business interests.
You can plug the ideal profile into the Sales Navigator on LinkedIn. This tool helps to generate a list containing hundreds of individuals that match that profile.

Now, you can get in touch with these individuals by using specific resources. This makes them sign up for your newsletters.

To ensure that you get the best of this method, we advise that you use an incentive as bait. An example is an e-book that they can download after subscribing. Using this method helps you to grow your list of subscribers with the right people on board.

Schedule Social Media Posts to Remind Followers of Your Email List

Social media marketing can help you remind your followers about subscribing to your email list. You can begin by scheduling posts using a free social media scheduler that carries email subscription links.

Ensure that you add what each person stands to enjoy from subscribing to your email list. Listing benefits is always a push to convert social media followers to subscribers. This is because people want to see what they stand to gain before subscribing.

Make sure that you add share buttons to your newsletters. This way, readers can share their experiences via social media.

Furnish Your Social Media with Your Email List

Technology has made life a lot easier, especially for businesses that want to integrate social media and email marketing. You can always upload your email lists to any of your social media platforms using simple steps.

The advantage of doing this that you get tailored, custom, and matched audiences depending on the social media platform. As such, it becomes easier for you to target ads to run social media campaigns.

Retarget Ads to Your Subscribers

Running social media ads is quite expensive. This means that you need to be a lot more deliberate with these ads not to waste funds.

When you retarget ads, you can focus your efforts on individuals that are already interested in your products or services. This promises better conversion rates and a higher ROI.

The best way to set up retarget ads, install a tracking code. This way, you can easily target ads to individuals who click on the page with the code.

Along with this, you can make use of URL shorteners. Add the resulting links to your posts to encourage those who haven’t visited your website to do so.

Wrap up

There are several other ways to integrate social media with email marketing. It is essential to know that social media marketing and email marketing will always complement each other.

This is why you must integrate both to get the best of both worlds. Ensure that you build strategies to help you grow in understanding and utilizing the integration.

What are your thoughts on combining social media and email marketing? Please let us know in the comments below.

About the Author

Maria is a content writer for the unlimited graphic design service Delesign with a keen interest in eCommerce and internet marketing. She is a communications graduate and understands what it takes to write persuasive copy and blog posts. Outside of work, you can find her mini-blogging about her life on social media.