Experienced marketers know that email and social media marketing go hand in hand as two key elements of a successful digital marketing approach and both need to be accommodated in the budget. They’re definitely not the only ones, as there are many types of digital marketing that you should be using simultaneously to build your online presence and achieve your goals.
That said, when it comes to building brand engagement and visibility on one hand, and generating qualified leads on the other, social and email go wonderfully together. Let's explore the symbiotic relationship between them, how to combine social and other content messaging, and give you the tips and best practices you should implement yourself to take your business to new heights in 2022.
Let’s dive in.
Understand how social and email work together
To start, let’s talk about all the ways your social strategy fuels your email efforts, and vice versa. There are numerous ways you can combine social media and email marketing, including:
- Reusing and optimizing content between the two
- Utilizing data from both to feed individual campaigns
- Developing a synchronized calendar
- Building your email list directly from your social posts
- Adding social CTAs to your emails
- Align direct communication between the two
- Use social to reach out to unsubscribers
- Use social media groups for email notifications
- Leverage social proof for your email campaigns
These are just some of the ways you can combine the two, and without a doubt, data will be at the core of all your efforts. This leads us to the first tip you should implement in your strategy.
Collect data to drive both strategies forward
Quality data is at the core of any optimized, goal-driven marketing campaign. You can use platform-specific data to fuel individual campaigns, of course, but you can also combine different data sources to empower different aspects of digital marketing.
Without a doubt, there are many ways to collect valuable data via social media and from your email campaigns. Both social platforms and email tools like SendGrid come with built-in reporting and analytics tools to give you a comprehensive overview of your metrics and KPIs.
Of course, these go well beyond just click-through rates, so make sure your reporting includes all of the essential social media metrics that businesses use today.
In addition, your company may need more specialized data that’s critical to your internal decisions. If so, you can use specialized data collection forms that can focus on capturing leads as well, or simply gathering customer and audience insights. When you capture complex customer data, you can then combine it with your email open rate and response rates, and your social media reports like your engagement, reach, and interactions.
This will allow you to ultimately deliver better content to your audience.
Align content for social and email
Content should be the foundational element of all your digital marketing efforts. From social posts to long-form educational articles, all the way to your optimized ad copy and your emails, content is at the forefront of every strategy.
Not only is it important to create and disseminate purposeful SEO content to build brand visibility across the web, it’s also important to create compelling content that will inspire, incentivize, and sell. To achieve this, it’s important that you ensure content consistency on social media and in your emails.
Keep in mind that your content will disseminate your brand’s voice and personality to the world, so you have to make sure it’s consistent. Make sure to identify the types of content your audience loves the most, and then scale it according to the requirements of each platform.
For example, you can use social listening and engagement metrics to figure out which content and wording work best, and then transfer that format and tone of voice into your emails. This approach blends beautifully with email tactics that boost your ROI.
Align your social and email calendars
Another great way to align your social and email efforts is to create a mutual content calendar for the purpose of driving engagement. This doesn’t mean that you should send out an email for every post you publish on social media, reather, it means that you should time your emails with your social posts and milestones.
Sending out emails to your customers is a great indirect way to maximize your social media marketing by simply notifying them of important events. For example, you can drive engagement for your live events, webinars, and contests by reminding your audience of the upcoming event via email.
On the other hand, this is a great opportunity to incentivize your social media followers to join your email list. The main perk being that they will get regular email updates and personalized stories delivered directly to their inbox so that they never miss a contest, a live event, or any important milestone.
In terms of daily operation, your email and social posting life can be made a lot easier by choosing one of the best email marketing services. Some offer specialized services for e-commerce, small businesses, or large enterprises, and many include helpful features such as automated workflows, follow-up sequences, or data/list segmentation. To integrate well with your social efforts, choose an email provider that lets you easily include your social icons in your emails, and has special features such as content calendars or timed distribution so that the timing of your email messages works perfectly with your social media plan. Using a tool like Stack's Spatial Browser is a great way to monitor daily social media operations as their setup allows you to focus on what matters most.
Integrate QR codes into email and social marketing
QR codes have been all the rage in online and offline marketing for years now, which should come as no surprise, as QR codes offer a quick and easy way for people to take action. The best part about using QR codes in marketing for your business, though, is the versatility.
You can use QR codes to sell, educate, disseminate free digital products, and much, much more. This is your opportunity to integrate QR codes into your emails and use a social media QR code to drive traffic, engagement, and of course, let the two fuel each other.
For example, by scanning a QR code in an email (which will also make your emails more visually appealing), a customer can go directly to one of your social pages or a specific, high-value post. This makes it easy to view the post but also to share it with their community.
If you’re not sure where to start with QR codes, we suggest trying it in your next referral marketing campaign. What could make it easier for one follower to refer others to you than a QR code in your social posts and email messages?
Use social networks to build your email list
Social media management brings many benefits to the table, one of which is the ability to grow your email list. In fact, it’s is one of the most organic ways to grow your email subscription list, as you can inspire and incentivize your followers by:
- Writing quality copy to go with every post
- Making your videos more engaging with CTAs
- Including written CTAs in posts and ads
- Collecting email addresses for your live events
- Collecting emails for special perks, deals, and discounts
You can leverage your social efforts to grow your email list by engaging with your followers in the comments as well, but also by reaching out in the DMs. Reaching out to people in the DMs is a popular way to incentivize them to become an email subscriber and thus generate qualified leads quickly.
Remember that with social, not everything that pairs with your email efforts has to be organic. For example, you can run Facebook ads designed to collect email addresses in exchange for a perk or discount. Don’t hesitate to think out of the box about how your social channels can be used to grow your permissioned email list quickly.
Communicate via social and email channels
Speaking of direct communication, keep in mind that both email and social media open up direct lines of communication with your customers. Experienced marketers know that they can use both channels to generate, nurture, and move leads through the marketing funnel.
One of the first engagement stages can be the comment section in your posts, where you can tag people and answer their questions. You can then move the conversation into the DMs, creating a lead and nurturing it until it’s ready to transition to a more concrete email correspondence.
This works great for lengthy sales processes in the B2B sphere, and once you move the lead into email communication, your support staff and virtual assistants can take over and start setting up meetings or discussing the details before they become your clients. This is also a good B2C strategy, but you can always try to cut the cycle short by incentivizing a sale directly in the DMs.
Leverage social trends for your email campaigns
To increase social media engagement for your brand efficiently and effectively, you need to stay on top of the latest trends for every platform and you need to monitor the email trends as well. Keep in mind that you can only optimize these strategies if you know the trends and if you understand the unique sensibilities of your target audience.
That said, you want to cross-examine both email and social media trends to identify overlaps and opportunities. For example, now that facebook groups are so popular, you can promote your groups to your audience via email, inspiring them to join and telling them exactly what they can expect to gain by becoming a member of your community.
Of course, you can also reverse this and use the same groups to promote your amazing email content and everything that it brings to your audience.
Integrate social and email into your multi-channel approach
Finally, make sure to look at email and social media as integral parts of your multi-channel marketing approach as a whole, and how these two can complement every other strategy in your arsenal.
Consider all the other marketing efforts you’re currently investing in, and integrate your email and social media reports into their data. Align your social and email communication with other marketing material, and ensure brand consistency across all marketing platforms.
You can then use email communication to promote your influencers and lead traffic to their posts on social media, which in turn link back to your social accounts. This will create a traffic loop that will continue to drive engagement and send traffic to your website, as well. Before starting your email communication make sure you have DMARC record enabled for your email domain so that your emails look credible and secure.
Now over to you
Without a doubt, you can run all your digital marketing campaigns separately if you want, but that wouldn’t be the most cost-effective way to invest in digital marketing as a whole. If you want to maximize your results, you want to combine different types of digital marketing and let your campaigns fuel each other.
When it comes to email and social media, you have an opportunity here to take both to the next level by leveraging the best practices we talked about today.