The value of email marketing cannot be overestimated. Its estimated ROI can go as high as stunning 3,800%. Email marketing helps you to lead new clients down the sales funnel as well as further engage with existing customers and strengthen your relationships. These aspects make email truly the king of marketing!
However, there are other ways for digital marketers to achieve results, such as PPC (pay-per-click) advertising, content marketing and, of course, SMM (social media marketing).
And although each and every method is effective in its own way, top companies recognize that utilizing them in unison and integrating different channels with one another has greater value. In this article, we’ll explore how SMM can be successfully integrated with email marketing and how this powerful combo can take your brand to a whole new level of marketing.
Why Integrate?
The most successful brands utilize a more holistic view of marketing, they are able to integrate different marketing and sales channels together and therefore run these channels as if it were a single grand campaign. When implementing such approach, you’ll soon realize that email and social media, despite being so different, work great together.
The holistic approach makes your brand look as a single entity that the customer can relate to. The ideal outcome is to make sure that no matter how the customer interacts with your business, whether on Twitter, calling customer support service or walking into your brick-and-mortar store, he or she will have a consistent experience that is defined by you.
But what email integration with social media will give you exactly? After all, it seems that all you do is just adding a couple of “share” buttons in your email. Not exactly, there are many more hidden benefits that can be achieved with some marketing ingenuity.
- Grow your email reach.
- Identify major influencers.
- Provide options for your customers.
- Increase your reach.
But how exactly can you achieve all of those things?
4 Creative and Efficient Ways to Integrate Social Media and Email Marketing
Sync calendars
Well, this might not be a very creative way to integrate SMM with email, but it’s sure one of the most efficient ways. But there are some challenges.
Getting calendars in sync is another crucial step towards the holistic marketing approach. Email marketing team usually has a very strict detailed and structured calendar, but it’s rarely connected in any way or form with the social media department. Very often the two teams will do the same work twice, without even realizing it, or the exact opposite may happen and you’ll simply miss an opportunity.
Holidays and customer birthdays are excellent examples of that. Let’s imagine that it’s one of your customer’s birthdays, it’s fully visible on social networks. However, when signing up for your newsletter he or she preferred not to share this information. Suddenly your SMM team has a piece of information that is valuable to the email marketing team. But because the two departments don’t share calendar information, a great opportunity to congratulate the client through a personalized email has been lost for another year!
Synced calendars make it easier to promote brand initiatives, schedule material without accidental conflicts and so on. There is nothing but advantages to getting all of your calendars synchronized.
Adding social icons to emails
This is the easiest of all integration solutions to boost your email campaign that you’ll probably ever encounter. Usually, these buttons are placed on the very top or very bottom of the email letter. It’s a great way to grow your social media following. But it’s always a good idea to think through the goals of your marketing campaigns before simply placing social icons.
There should be a clear reason why the customer needs to click on the button, and it brings us to the next way of improving marketing campaigns.
Incentives
In life, if you want to receive something – you need to give something in return. In business and marketing, the trick is to balance out this ratio to your advantage. Remember about this 3,800% ROI – that’s a great balance. If you want customers to subscribe to your newsletter, you need to first think how they will benefit from it.
Why should I press the like button? Why should I share this email with a friend? These are all the questions that pop up in the mind of every client. It falls upon you to provide an answer.
The most typical and one of the most effective ways to answer such questions is with a financial incentive, or as we call them – coupons! The “Buy one get one free” works like clockwork. But the incentive should not always be financial, you might promise customers a chance to be featured in your next email correspondence.
Social contest
This ties closely to the incentives. However, viral social contests are a bit different from simply giving out discounts and should be treated accordingly.
The trick to starting an engaging contest is in the word “engagement”. Customers are not that interested in simply following your Twitter account for a chance to win something. The contest should be constructed as a journey with multiple stages that your audience should go through. And the further they go the larger their prize. This is a great way to expand a customer base across all social channels and email.
SMM & Email Marketing integration Platform – 366 Degrees
Running a social-focused email campaign is not an easy task. It requires multiple iterations to get it right and personalize it to your own audience. And it requires a set of tools to run, monitor and analyze your campaign. At OMI we’ve built the perfect solution for marketing automation and integrating your email campaigns with other sales channels. 366 Degrees is an all-round platform that provides an effective way to run all of your marketing campaigns from the convenience of a single interface.
In addition, our solution allows seamless Salesforce email marketing integration to connect your sales and marketing departments and reach a new level of customer communication and engagement.