Bertha's Blog: How to Make Social Media And Email Marketing Work Together

We’ve been saying that all your marketing channels need to work together to achieve your goals. We say that a lot. Each marketing channel is, after all, part of a tactic in your greater strategy. The trick is to leverage each channel at what it does best. So what are each channel’s strengths?

If you’re going to use any marketing channel effectively, you need to know how to use it properly. That includes knowing what works well for each medium. Social media, with some exceptions (I’m looking at you, Instagram), isn’t a great place for direct sales, bottom-of-the-funnel conversions, or the end of a customer journey, or whatever terminology you choose to use.

What is social media good at?

Building brand recognition
Building brand loyalty
Building community
Driving traffic back to your website
Increasing conversion opportunities

The trickiest part of social media is that you don’t control who sees your messages. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram – all have algorithms that restrict your posts’ organic reach. Remember, all these platforms are publicly-traded companies now and their main business is advertising. They’re happy to let you pay to get your message out. But they won’t make it easy for you to spread your words organically.

GetResponse

Email marketing has a big difference – you control (almost) everything. For email the “how to use it” goes beyond understanding how to use your email provider’s platform. Just like social media posts are written in a way to generate engagement, emails (subject lines and body copy) are written to encourage opens and clicking links. Why is that? Because email marketing is good at:

Building relationships with customers
Delivering targeted and personalized messages
Converting subscribers into customers
Retaining customers
Delivering upsell opportunities

Email is a great medium for the bottom of the funnel activities and getting customers to the sales page. Remember that email is how most consumers want to receive transactional and business communications. Generally speaking, it’s where people expect to receive offers and sales messages, so make use of that wisely. But if marketers use email and social media for different purposes, how can they work together?

Treat them as complements

Social media and email complement each other. One is good where the other is weak. So use each channel to build the other. Otherwise known as cross-promotion. You can cross-promote your channels in several ways:

Use social posts and ads to promote your lead magnets. This will increase your subscriber list.
Use apps – like Facebook web form integration – to allow people to sign up for your list straight from social media.
Leverage user generated content across all your channels to build community. This can be reviews, posts from visitors to your social profiles or even Instagram images. Always ask before using!
Include your social profiles in your email template.
Offer exclusive discounts to both social followers and subscribers. The goal is to get them join your list or follow you on social networks – whichever they have not done yet.
Use social ads targeting your email subscribers to direct them to specific product pages.

Think of the Rule of Seven in marketing. It’s easy for both email and social media to be at least two of those contacts before a customer buys from you. Which is the ultimate goal, after all.

Share your content between channels

This should seem obvious within the context of a larger marketing campaign. Use the same content, adapted for each medium, across all your distribution channels. That keeps the messaging consistent and recognizable. But it’s not necessary to take this course of action just for campaigns. Use your content wisely across email and social media. If there’s a great video that will help your audience, use both social and email to bring it to your customer’s attention.

Drive traffic to wherever you think is most important for your goals. Create teasers from long-form content to drive fans/subscribers to your destination/lead page. Use more than one channel. Social algorithms mean you never know when a fan will see a post. So, what if they happen to see it on more than one social network? That’s an extra “Rule of Seven” contact.

One is not better than the other

Remember that email marketing and social media are both necessary for a well-rounded digital marketing strategy. One is not inherently better than the other. Each channel has its own strengths and weaknesses. Each has its own place in the marketing ecosystem.

How do you do it?

Have you been successful in integrating both social media and email marketing in your business? What’s worked for you? What hasn’t? Share your successes in the comments below.