Email and Social Media – Ebony and Ivory

01 Apr Email and Social Media – Ebony and Ivory

Monica Callus, lost in a forest of red cups

When I started Novemnine, I was always keen to have a number of people contributing to my content – the idea being that I’d have interesting people writing

about interesting things. So, as we hurtle towards our first birthday I thought it’d be a great opportunity to bring in a couple of new voices. First up is Monica Callus. I used to work with Monica and we’d have great fun bouncing ideas around and arguing about words and grammar. Monica is a marketing professional based in Camden, London. She enjoys playing squash and hand-making pottery, although almost never at the same time. You can follow Monica on Twitter or find out a little more about her on LinkedIn.

So you’ve nailed the email marketing strategy you wrote? Tick. And you’ve gone and done some social media like you said you would? Tick tick. And you’ve made sure that they’re integrated and complement each other? Ti…wait. What?

Nothing seems to move quite as fast as marketing best practice – and that’s one of the reasons it’s a lively and interesting industry to work in but the pay-off is that keeping up with everyone else can be exhausting. Here’s a brief breakdown on why email and social don’t need to compete for your attention and how they can be used to enhance one another.

To break this down in the simplest and most effective way, there’s a brand new mantra in town: Link, refer, reward, repeat

Perhaps the easiest (and inexpensive) ways to generate traffic on your social platforms from your existing customers is to include buttons on your emails. Social buttons at the bottom of emails tend to get a bit lost in T&Cs and antivirus information, so if possible, why not try to have these closer to the top? These can act as a bit of a net for those readers who aren’t quite done with your email, but are not compelled to click on anything else you’ve got going on in the body text.

So what about those potential consumers who don’t receive your emails? Well the ultimate goal is to make sure that anyone who wants your news can get your news. Ideally, you want these prospective stakeholders to come across your social media sites and turn into fully-fledged subscribers. To do this, it’s worth spending some time working out how you could use your burgeoning social platforms to highlight the benefits of connecting with you. You could use offers, deals, or promotions exclusive to your social followers. If these individuals already show signs of engagement with your content, then you can bet that there’s a chance they’re interested in other things you’ve got to say. Today, Facebook and Twitter both recognise hashtags (previously just Twitter), so there is an opportunity to tie your campaigns just a little closer together. Hashtags allow your content to be searchable on social platforms, improving the visibility of your content. Using your hashtags alongside images in email banners is a subtle reminder that there is probably more to find on the social networks.

Using social platforms to gain email subscribers is also becoming ever more popular. One of the easiest methods to use is the Twitter Lead Generation Cards which, until recently, were only for a select few businesses but is now available for everyone to take advantage. Using Facebook Call to Action buttons is another way to gain data – it’s all connected.

Spending time on careful content building and analysing the success of specific campaigns is an important part of the follow-up strategy. There are many ways of doing this, depending on your success measure. It doesn’t have to be costly either, but if there’s scope for it in your budget, it’s definitely worth doing – also, social media platforms usually have pretty good analytical tools built in.

Last note – I’d really recommend having a quick look at the emails you receive and seeing how they manage to bridge the gap (or not) between their content and social platforms. It can help to see things from a bit of a distance to fully appreciate what may or may not work.

So really knitting together your email and social strategy to serve a common purpose is as easy as link, refer, reward, repeat.