I like to think of myself as somewhat of a connoisseur of e-mail marketing and as such I am subscribed to many e-mail marketing lists from quirky brand emails such as Innocent Drinks to large corporate emails such as Apple and Disney. I normally spend a significant portion of my working week sifting through all these e-mails and combining this with historical data from the hundreds of thousands of emails we send out on behalf of our clients every week, I have a fairly good idea of what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to e-mail marketing. Don’t get me wrong; I am not bragging here, I think I am just an email marketing nerd!
Much has been made of the so-called death of email marketing, and numerous articles have been written, including by myself, on how marketers are having to become more ‘savvy’ with their e-marketing strategies, but one of the main things that doesn’t seem to be being picked up on is how to make e-mail marketing more social.
We all know how important social media integration is nowadays with general marketing campaigns and at Big Dot Media we build some fantastic campaigns with social media integrated at the heart of them, but we don’t seem to see a lot of social media integration when it comes to e-mail marketing.
In reality, the same social media integration that is used on websites and other online and offline assets can quite easily be transferred to emails.
Lets take a really simple example; I receive an email from a well-known fashion brand that does social media really well. They have great Facebook and Twitter engagement, and a really active fan base, but social media integration in their e-mails is resigned to two small links to their relevant social media pages at the bottom of their emails. I know this brand has dedicated social media resource, and they obviously spend a lot of time, effort and money on their social media presence in general, but it seems an afterthought on their emails.
What could they do? Well, their email contains numerous images and links to products on their website so why not put a ‘like’ or ‘share’ links on the products themselves. To show proof of social media engagement why not put the last 5 noteworthy tweets or status updates in the email and finally why not cross sell the benefits of joining their online communities with some nice info messages about what benefits they get by being a Twitter Follower or a Facebook fan.
Particularly in this B2C market, social proof is a major factor in consumer behaviour and this needs to shine through in all forms of communications not just directly in the social media channels.
I will admit that integrating social media into emails, heck just doing social media in general, is a lot harder of B2B brands, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try! Why not try experimenting with individual sharing links in your news items, or just adding some tweets and Facebook status updates in your email, just to give your emails a more personal touch. Customers love getting close to their brands and feeling like the brand is letting them in ‘backstage’ in the life of the brand, so even if you are the most conservative and traditional brand, it will pay to let your customers see a little bit of your personality.
When you think about it, social and email are very similar, both are relatively inexpensive, easy to set up and maintain, provide rapid feedback and response and can produce a very engaged audience, so it makes sense to use them in combination to increase both email marketing effectiveness and social engagement.
There are two very important by-products of combining social with email; Firstly, with the introduction of content mail filters such as Google Priority Inbox, it is more important than ever that your email audience engages with your email in some way, otherwise you may find that your next e-mail may not even be delivered to their inbox. The other advantage is that increase social media engagement is now an attributable factor in search engine rankings. The more engaged your brand is in the social media channels, the better your search engine results will be, so give your customers and potential customers every possible opportunity to engage with your brand.
I wont go into the technical and coding details about how to integrate social into your emails in this article, as there are so many articles on the web on how to do that, all I will say is that technically its so easy to do that there really is no excuse on why you cannot start integrating social into your email marketing campaigns tomorrow.
I have to go now and sift through the 35 marketing emails I have received while I have been writing this article!
If you see any great examples of social media in email marketing, feel free to send them to me, and if I get enough, I may even start a gallery of best practice. If you need any advice or support in getting social with your email marketing, please call me on 01270 613310 or contact us.
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