social_integrationWe are all aware of the typical social sharing icons in emails by now, but today’s marketer should go one step further and link their social media marketing with their email marketing campaigns to benefit from the available and quite obvious synergies.

Promoting social sharing and interaction with your email contacts complement and reinforce the online dialog efficiently. If coordinated properly, you easily grow your email list and extend the potential reach of your message enormously.

Actually, a variety of measures is available on the operational level, but it doesn’t always need be a complex campaign in the first place, implying messages that are build precisely on each other over multiple platforms that leads to success. There are also measures that are uncomplicated to implement but still efficient, such as the following:

Link newsletters to your social media profiles: Here you should note that an email can’t be linked and therefore the relevant newsletter should also be available as an online version. You should make sure that there are no major overlaps between the newsletter and social media content, because it makes no sense to link a newsletter in social media whose contents have already been communicating through this channel. The frequency of the newsletter linking has to be arranged very sensitively as well. Anyway, never link all issue of the newsletter, instead onlyuse particular highlights. If a user can obtain each newsletter issue via social media, there is no more reason for him to sign up for the newsletter. Therefore, the linking of newsletter highlights is recommended only for companies with a high distribution rate. Those that send out news only once a quarter don’t really have a lot of choices to offer.

Encourage questions and discussions: Social Media is perfect to initiate discussions about the own company, own brands or products. The impetus for a discussion does not necessarily have to come from the respective social network. You can take advantage of your newsletter as well, asking e.g. for feedback on its content on your company’s social media profiles to initiate a dialogue, providing the users a focal point for comments, replies, etc. You could also ask specific questions that can be answered on the social media platforms and announce for instance incentives in return.

Pick up discussions in emails: What works in the direction email to social media, also works the other way around. If there are interesting discussions about your company in social media, you can pick them up for email marketing, too. Sum up discussion results or answers to questions and present them in your newsletter - preferably with an indication that encourages participation in the discussion. You can in principle also publish individual contributions, including user names in the newsletter, but you the consent of the concerned user need in any case.

Exclusive offers for newsletter subscribers: Promise your social media contacts exclusive promotions when they sign up for your newsletter and tease them quickly on your social media profiles. Alternatively, you can also provide particularly attractive offers in full on social media to make consumers wish for more. If possible, integrate the opt-in form for the newsletter directly in the social media profile to create as little work as possible for your contacts during the registration.

With that in mind, start integrating email and social media in an innovative and creative way.

By Daniela La Marca