DMN3 Blog

Integrating email and social media effectively is not just adding “sharing” and “connecting” icons to your current email marketing communications. While that’s better than nothing, here are some strategies for more effective email and social media integration.

There are enough studies out there that show that using social media as part of your email marketing communications increases their click through rates and conversions. In my last post I discussed some of these studies and the value of email and social media integration. This post will concentrate on specific strategies to effectively join together email and social media marketing campaigns.

Start with Your Intended Audience: While we know that Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are the most common social media sites used in such an integration effort, I would still urge you to begin at the beginning…your intended audience. I’ve written previously on the importance of understanding your targeted audience. You can find those posts here:

You need to make sure that the social media channels you choose are aligned with the use and interests of your targeted markets. Focusing on the social media channels that are used by your audience will allow you to get the most bang for your efforts. You can use online subscriber surveys, analysis of inbound links used by subscribers and other vehicles to determine which social media channels are most appropriate for your integration efforts.

Don’t offer too many options for sharing. Too many options actually reduce sharing. Three to five sharing options are enough if you have done your homework and know your target market.

Track the content that is being shared by your email subscribers and social media channels. This provides greater insight as to the interests of targeted consumers and can be used as a basis to create additional content.

What’s Your Integration Objective? Is it to expand your communication channels with existing customers, subscribers and connections or is it to drive new leads to your brand or organization?

A clear objective will prevent you from confusing the two. Remember your “call to action” (CTA) should reflect your objective for the campaign.

Align Email Templates with Your Audience and Objective: I’m a great believer in testing your designs with those whom you would like to reach and impact. You can do this subjectively through the use of focus groups as well as with actual A/B split testing to assure your design templates work as intended.

General Approaches to Integration: Remember that consumers expect different things from social media and email marketing messages. While email marketing can be very targeted, social media channels are made up of a number of different personas.

Understand that role of social media vis-à-vis email and other marketing channels. It is about a conversation, not a sales pitch. It is focused on supporting your marketing message rather than closing the sale.

By following a few simple approaches you can reap the benefits of an effectively integrated email and social media marketing campaign.

The first step is Social Media Presence: It’s tough to integrate your email and social media efforts without social media places to start and continue conversations. You should have a presence on the social media sites in which your targeted audience congregates. Generate blogs, construct profiles, create and/or join groups, etc. as appropriate for your messaging and target audience.

Other general approaches include:

• Make it easy for email subscribers to share your communications and content
• Create content that appeals to the different personas that make up the social media user base. Balance entertainment, information, promotions and offerings. Remember you need to meet the expectations of different audiences.
• Cross promote email content to social media and vice-versa
• Make sure you have alignment of your promotions across online channels. Tone and content should be different, but overall marketing message should be aligned.
• Spend time and carry on conversations with your target audience on the social media sites where they congregate.

Specific Integration Strategies to Get You Started: Consider these specific tactics to improve your email and social media integration efforts. (many of these are taken from Exact Target & CoTweet’s Report #6: The Collaborative Future.

• Add "share" and "connect" links in your email message and newsletters. They allow your subscribers to easily share the content with their social channels or to become a fan or follower on your social media sites. Make them prominent and consistent in location.
• Notify your email subscribers that you are on social media sites and provide reasons and incentives to join your social media groups and follow you on Twitter.
• Make email content relevant and sharable. Include media types that subscribers are most likely to share like video, photos, etc.
• Fit elements of content to be shared with specifications of targeted sites. For example limit e-newsletter article titles shared with Twitter to 140 characters including a shortened URL.
• Add links to your social media pages on your personal and transactional email communications. Include links as part of your email signature.
• Promote social media contests, applications and other engaging content in your email and Twitter posts.
• Feature entrants and winners of contests or other types of competitions in your emails and newsletters.
• Promote content and promotions on social media that are only available to your email subscriber base.
• Provide vehicles for email newsletter signup as part of your social media profile, groups, etc as well as include email newsletter sign up as a step in the process of social media marketing campaigns.
• Provide newsletter sign up on landing pages for people who link to your website from social media sites
• Highlight blog content in newsletters that link to the full content via a landing page
• Offer social media channels as an option for receiving newsletter content via Twitter feeds, social site notification, etc
• Include Like and Follow buttons in email and newsletter promotions
• Tweet about exclusive content that is only available to email subscribers
• Promote exclusive deals on social media sites but make it only available to email subscribers.
• Post links to web versions of your best emails on social media sites
• Collect email addresses at point of conversion for consumers who link to your site from social media sites
• Create an email segment containing Twitter followers and provide them with additional “insider information” through email
• Include questions posed on social media sites in your emails and then answer them.
• Encourage email subscribers to post questions on your social media sites.
• Host videos on your social media pages. Include links to your emails and post links on Twitter.

Fortunately for all professional email marketers, email application providers such as Exact Target and Constant Contact are making big bets on social media and are adding tools for their customers to enable better targeting based on social data as well as to better integrate email with social media marketing channels.