“Integrated marketing communications is a way of looking at the whole marketing process from the viewpoint of the customer.”
While email marketing is still considered effective, social media marketing is not far behind. 73% of marketers agreed that social media marketing has been “very effective” or “somewhat effective” for their business ventures. Now, the question is, what if we integrate both these effective marketing channels? The results are going to be surprising and beneficial.
Businesses that integrate all branches of marketing are able to create an excellent customer experience. When social media and email marketing are used together, the outcome will surely break individual records of success that these channels had individually.
So, without wasting further time, let us have a look at some of the ways through which we can bring together the two most popular and result-driven marketing channels – email marketing and social media marketing.
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As per the latest social media statistics, the number of global social media users is estimated to be 3.5 billion, and this number is growing every day. Considering the reach and popularity of channels like Facebook, Twitter, etc., social media channels happen to be one of the useful tools to grow your email list. To build the list of your choice, you can use different platforms to post your email sign-up forms and encourage the fans and followers to join your brand’s email newsletter.
Remember to pitch for your newsletter in the right way on social media platforms to let your followers know why they should sign-up for your email newsletter. Include quality and useful content in your newsletter for which followers will be encouraged to share their email id to become a subscriber. This way, you can integrate social media to grow your contact list.
Below is a survey report that reveals that social media is considered very important by more than 58% of marketers:
Social media ads help brands to increase product and brand awareness among their targeted audience. Offering increased reach, higher engagement level, and wider fan reach, social media ads have proven to be effective in promoting business. However, running these ads can be a little heavy on your marketing budget. That is why, before making any investment on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter ads, it is always better to test your ad ideas to know if it will work or not.
This is where email marketing can help digital marketers to make informed decisions while running ads on social media platforms. You can use email campaigns to A/B test images and subject lines on your potential customers to understand their likes or dislikes better. Based on which subject line works best, you can use the input for social media ads so that you can achieve more conversions through social media paid advertising efforts.
Marketers do have the marketing calendar that helps them work in an organized and systematic manner. So, it is obvious to expect that digital marketers like you will have an email marketing calendar and social media calendar to optimize your marketing strategies better. But the question here arises is whether both calendars are integrated or not? In most cases, the answer remains no.
With no access to each other’s calendars, both email marketing and social media teams end up doing the same work, being unaware of what the other side is up to. It is essential to integrate both social media and email calendar so that both the teams are on the same page and knows when their campaigns start and end. This helps each of the groups to plan their marketing strategies with better coordination and no conflict.
Some of your brand’s social media followers may not know about your presence on social networking sites. In that case, you can use your email campaigns to spread awareness regarding the same by including social media buttons that will lead to your profile. Besides, you can write a line or two on why they should follow the brand’s social media page to encourage the email subscribers.
Through email campaigns, let the audience know that you have an active social community where you regularly share valuable content and insights which they would not want to miss.
To support the promotional efforts of marketers, Twitter offers a special platform called Twitter Cards. This platform allows your followers to sign-up for the email list without having to leave the Twitter platform. Whenever a user clicks on your tweet, he/she gets to see the call to action (CTA) button and the offer being promoted through that tweet. Interested users then can click again on the sign-up button to give permission for further communication. That is when the contact information is collected and shared by Twitter with you.
You can even use the Facebook page to add subscribers to your email list. The CTA button can be customized, and for that, you need to follow simple steps. Click on the CTA button on the brand’s Facebook page, then select sign-up from the drop down menu and attach a link to your website sign-up form. In this way, you can convert followers to email subscribers that, too, without having to leave the social media platform.
Re-targeting customers with relevant offers at the right time through display ads are a common practice nowadays. This ensures high level of engagement. Even you can use social media re-targeting to reintroduce products to your email subscribers who are already interested in your products. Doing so will help you to bring back them to the website to make a purchase. Through re-targeting ads, marketers can approach customers with offers based on their previous online actions.
On different social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, Linkedin you can use variety of ad formats to re-target email subscribers. When a visitor of your site buys something or ads products to cart, your re-targeting partner leaves a cookie reporting this action. This cookie later informs the re-targeting partner when it notices your bounced visitor on any other site or social media platform. Then the cookied visitor is re-targeted with ads on the basis of their purchase intent and prior engagement.