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Are your social media and email marketing strategies aligned? That togetherness (or lack thereof) could be the difference between so-so and successful digital marketing results.
The social media market is forecast to experience a compound annual growth rate of 39% and be worth $833.50 billion by 2026. Meanwhile, email remains the reigning champion of digital marketing ROI, with a $42 return for every $1 spent.
With stats like the above, imagine the results if you integrated the two channels to work together. We discuss ways to do just that in this article.
Email & Social Media Marketing - The Difference
What makes social media and email marketing so different? Here are a couple of factors that distinguish the two.
Ownership
Social media marketing involves marketing on platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok. You don't own these platforms, meaning you're susceptible to the whims and caprices of the platform owners. This is a huge weakness of this marketing channel.
Meanwhile, you own your email list. So whether you built it from scratch or compiled the list using some of the best email finder tools, you get to decide how to use and interact with your email subscribers.
Channel Goals
Marketers have different goals in mind when adopting these two marketing channels. While social media channels can help to build brand awareness, email marketing usually aims to convert. You should also consider using social media scheduling tools to make posting easy!
The infographic below shows more goal-related differences:
Social media is also a good way to increase website traffic, build a community, and cultivate brand loyalty, while email marketing helps with customer retention and relationship building.
We’ve looked at what differentiates social media and email marketing. Let’s now dive deep into why you need to combine the two and how to do it. You should also use social media monitoring tools to track your competitors!
Why Brands Need To Combine Social Media and Email Marketing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYzmG_7nx3Y
There are a couple of reasons why you should combine an email marketing campaign with your social media efforts. Some of these reasons include the following:
Boosting Your Brand's Reach
When combined, social media and email marketing offer a two-pronged approach to reaching customers. Just be sure you're measuring your social media analytics to measure your progress.
To illustrate, consider that the average email open rate across industries is under 30% (perhaps due to weak email subject lines). See the infographic below for open rates specific to a handful of industries:
The above statistic implies that even if you’ve built a considerable mailing list, a lot of its members may not be reading your emails. Also, be sure to master email subject lines in your marketing!
However, if your subscribers double as followers on the various social channels you maintain a presence on, you get a second chance to share your message with them.
Build a Stronger Sales Funnel
As illustrated above, there’s no such thing as the perfect marketing channel. In other words, individually, social media and email marketing have their strengths and weaknesses.
Therefore, it makes sense to combine the two. Each marketing channel can compensate for the weakness of the other. That allows you to build a stronger sales funnel on the back of their combined strengths. Social media automatic posting can also take a business to the next level!
Understand Your Audience Better
Emailing your list members can feel like a one-sided interaction sometimes. Yes, you can rely on email open rates to gauge how well your messages resonate with your list, but it doesn't paint the full picture:
- What do your potential customers think of your brand?
- What problems have existing customers faced when using your products or services?
- Are they recommending your brand to friends and family?
Knowing the answers to the above questions will be invaluable to shaping future strategies.
While social media analytics won’t help you answer the above questions any more than email marketing metrics, connecting with your list on social media has its advantages. Mainly, you can engage in conversations with followers and even conduct social listening. The result is a deeper understanding of your audience.
5 Ways To Integrate Social Media with Email Marketing
Now that you know why it's important to combine social media and email marketing, how do you get started? Try adopting the strategies discussed below.
- Establish a Common Language
The first step to integrating your email and social media marketing is maintaining a common language between the two channels. This consistency will be crucial to establishing trust with potential customers who’re new to your brand.
For example, if the messaging on your social media handles is cheery and informal, followers who opt into your email list may be taken aback by email messaging that adopts a formal tone. We also recommend hiring an agency social media management team to run your social media!
The infographic above shows other reasons why consistent branding across channels is important.
Besides possibly driving potential customers away, you risk losing out on revenue. According to Forbes, consistent branding across platforms can increase revenue by 23%.
- Run Social Media Ads to Interested Email Subscribers
If you have an existing email list, consider running social media ads to its members. To do that, upload your email subscriber list to social networks like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
Uploading your subscriber list to social media platforms lets you put faces to the email addresses you’ve collected over time. And you can gain insights into these potential customers (e.g., their interests, likes, dislikes, etc.) that will aid you when crafting your email strategy.
When you learn about their interests, pain points, and goals, you can develop products or services to help them. Then, you can run social media ads they’re likely to respond to.
Moreover, you can use features like Facebook’s custom audience feature to create lookalike audiences for your campaigns. This is a great way to optimize your campaigns and ensure they’re shown to people who match your ideal audience persona.
We discuss additional ways uploading your subscriber list to social media benefits your business below.
- Embed Social Media Profiles in Your Emails
Your marketing emails should include icons of the social media accounts you maintain. These social networks give your email subscribers an additional way to connect with your brand.
In addition, a presence on social media platforms can tell potential customers you’re a legitimate business.
But you need to be subtle about it.
Unless your email marketing efforts aim to get more reach on social media, it's best not to overemphasize the icons. After all, you wouldn't want your email campaign message to get lost in the fray.
Instead, you can include them in the email footer, as Payoneer does in the image below:
This positioning prevents readers from missing the point of your promotional emails while increasing the odds of exposure to your social media content.
- Upload Your Subscriber List to Social Media Platforms
Even if you don’t intend to run social media ads to your list, uploading your subscriber list to social media is still a good idea. When your email list meets your social media campaign, you gain an incredibly crucial benefit: customer loyalty.
Integrating subscribers into your social media audience helps your customer relationship management efforts. According to a 2021 Customer Experience Trends Report by Zendesk, the number of social media users who sought customer support via social media jumped 110% between 2020 and 2021.
As the image below shows, H&M’s customers regularly ask customer support questions in the comments section of their social media posts:
Therefore, by adding your email list members on social media, you give them a convenient way to ask customer support-related questions. And answering them will do wonders for customer loyalty.
- Use Social Media Channels to Grow Your Mailing List
Not all of your social media followers will be on your mailing list. So why not invite the ones that aren’t to join?
The way you go about soliciting email sign-ups will be platform dependent. For example, on a platform like Instagram, you can use your bio.
Your Instagram bio is like a digital business card in the sense that it usually contains information about your brand. However, when you include a link to an email sign-up form, it can also serve as a medium for collecting emails. In the image below, skincare brand Moral Melody Skincare deftly employs this tactic:
The above method is a good start for companies aiming to create social media sales funnels.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is email social media?
Email social media is an exciting way to combine two of the most powerful forms of communication. It uses both email data and social media data, making it a highly efficient way to increase the relevance and targetability of your email campaigns.
Is email an example of social media?
Email is not a form of social media. Email is a one-on-one communication tool. Social media platforms like Twitter allow millions of users to communicate in one spot. Email is a social tool but is not considered social media.
What do people use email for?
People use email for a variety of reasons. Email is mostly used for communication between friends, businesses, and customers. However, email is also a powerful marketing tool that can drive sales & traffic to a business.
Conclusion
Integrating your social media and email marketing is essential for success. The two marketing strategies are better together.
As a first step, upload your existing email subscribers to your social media. Also, ensure that all emails you send out to your list include social icons. Promote your list on your social media accounts. And consider hosting contests on social media to subtly collect emails while drumming up interest in your brand.
If you combine your social media and email marketing strategies, the sky is your limit when marketing digitally.
