Email marketing and social media marketing are currently the two most popular instruments in digital marketing. But the marketing industry is divided as to which one is more effective: There are marketers who swear blind email marketing is more effective, and strong advocates of social media. But why arguing and comparing if we can enhance the process and integrate both instruments?
Our guest writers from EssayShark explain the benefits of each channel, exchanging their conversion rates and the speed of lead generation, as well as how to integrate social media marketing with email marketing.
In this article, we are going to share with you how to combine emails and social media efforts and make them work at full capacity.
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Difference between social media and email marketing
Before we start, let’s distinguish the difference between these two channels. Why should any business consider using SMM? The main purpose is to ensure constant communication with potential and current clients and enhancing brand awareness.
With the help of social media marketing, companies can increase their sales, handle objections and negative, work on the company’s reputation and awareness, boost traffic, etc. Many marketers often make a false step and evaluate the results of their work in social media with the number of subscribers and likes. The main metrics in SMM are involvement, outreach, comments, and likes. You can always rely on these data and estimate the results of your work. Various analytical tools can assist you in analyzing and improving your strategy. A dialogue with your subscribers is a key component of a successful social media plan. The users are sick and tired of advertisements and just want to have clear communication. So, give them what they require.
Many people believe that email marketing is old-school and not effective. That’s the main mistake they make and will have to pay for it. This channel is necessary for increasing brand awareness. With the help of an email marketing campaign, you can attract a new target audience, enhance sales and conversion rates, and improve relations with your partners. This instrument won’t let your clients forget about you - you can always keep in touch. A customized and targeted segmentation gives you the benefit of showing your customers only the information they are interested in. Moreover, it’s a wonderful way to announce your discounts and special offers.
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Both instruments help to establish communication channels with your potential and current customers. But they have different goals and tools.
Email services are capable of:
- personalizing emails and increasing the conversion rates;
- segmenting the audience to send unique and useful offers to customers;
- automating emails, using triggered email campaigns to convert subscribers to buyers and stimulate recurring sales.
In other words, email marketing concentrates on sales and keeping customers.
Social media has its advantages:
- for example, on Facebook, you can invite users to events, arrange contests, gather feedback, share news and special offers, have discussions and encourage your audience;
- on Instagram, you communicate with your customers through visual content that provokes emotions. This guarantees a higher involvement rate of your audience.
Thus, social networks are used for enhancing brand awareness and maintaining emotional relations with your current and potential clients.
How to integrate email marketing with social media marketing
Digital marketers often have discussions about the preferable instrument for reaching more effective results. Even though these methods interact with clients differently, they have one common goal: to spread the information and communicate to increase loyalty, sales, and awareness of the users. How to integrate email marketing with social media marketing then?
Professionals tend to use both instruments for efficient results in digital marketing. Most likely, the audience on social media and in email campaigns will overlap. But this could never be a 100% overlapping! According to numerous researches, the number of overlapping audiences can be up to 60%.
Allow your customers to choose the preferred method of communication with your company but don’t push to use both. Remind them that you are always happy to see them on your social media if they are unsubscribing from your email campaign and vice versa.
Steps of integrating SMM and email marketing
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Let’s take a closer look at the steps of combining both marketing methods:
- Add social media icons with active links to the emails you send. Make sure that the icons don’t distract the user from the main idea of the letter. Put them in the footer or header, just as a slight reminder to check out your brand elsewhere;
- Offer to subscribe to your emails on social media. Many people tend to switch from networks to emails, especially when it’s something business-related;
- Give a sneak-peak of what subscribers will get in their newsletters. Demonstrate an example of the emails you send on social media and offer to subscribe;
- Remind about social media pages even in the unsubscribe letter. If your analytics indicates that your emails are not effective, offer users to check out your social media profiles;
- Add real feedback from social media to your emails. Social proofs are excellent instruments in email marketing. The psychological factor that other real people enjoyed your products and services increase the possibility of sales by 63%.
These are the first steps for you to take while integrating SMM and email marketing. However, there are more advanced methods that can keep your subscribers and even attract new ones.
How to keep people interested and drive newsletter signups, improve open rates, click-through rates
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Many businesses face the problem of improving open rates and keeping their subscribers involved. We prepared a list of life hacks that can help you enhance your metrics and sales:
- Use “Share” buttons inside your emails. According to research, the click-through-rate in emails with the share buttons is higher by 158% in comparison to average letters. The most popular networks are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest;
- Offer additional motivation. Give something in exchange for users’ emails. For example, this can be a new sticker pack, a free webinar, a discount or free attendance to an event.
- Arrange a contest on social media and announce it via email. Potential and current customers love entertaining activities with gifts. An email campaign can boost traffic to your social media accounts and increase the involvement rate;
- Install the RSS feed from social media to your newsletter. Thus, your users can track the latest posts on your social media no matter when they open the email.
- Offer special terms for the subscribers. You can create a “secret club” for your customers who are subscribed to your social media pages, newsletter, or both. These can be discounts or other benefits depending on your business.
Of course, all these tips and tricks won’t bring any results if you offer low-quality services or products, and your content is boring.
As you can see, these two types of marketing are not enemies and supplement each other. Use email marketing to announce your company’s activity and offer to your clients, while SMM will keep you in touch with them. With the help of various services and tools, you can customize this integration in such a way that you would spend minimum time and get maximum results.
