They say that opposites attract. When it comes to email and social media, ne’er a truer word was spoken. The old stalwart of digital communication, combined with the rising star of the B2B marketing world, create a potent marriage of reliable, easily-analysed, targeted messaging, with the cutting edge of self-propagating, limitless-reach mass interaction.
Maximising the marriage of these two potent forces will help you to create a powerful promotion mix that will reach out to your customers – wherever they are.
It may increase your workload, but it will be worth it.
With the proliferation of social and multimedia platforms, marketers are working harder than ever. According to a 2013 survey of senior UK B2B digital marketers:
- 74%: “Keeping up with technology is even more of a challenge than it was three years ago.”
- 73%: “Being a marketer has become more challenging in the last three years.”
- 65%: “Responsible for marketing to a wider range of territories than three years ago.”
The spread of social media into target marketing has a lot to answer for.
Email marketing is not dead.
However, in a bid to accommodate the rise of social media, don’t be tempted to shirk on your email marketing.
According to Adestra’s 2013 Email Marketing Industry Census:
- 66% of in-house marketers rated email as having an ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ ROI, second only to SEO (75%).
- 55% of companies said they generated more than 10% of their sales from email marketing alone.
- The measurability of email’s effectiveness was a primary reason for its ongoing appeal.
Equally, social media is now a target marketing force to be reckoned with…
38% of companies said that social media and engagement was a top marketing priority in 2013.
Who’s doing what?
A 2012 survey by The Chartered Institute of Marketing found that respondents considered the following platform’s core to their business marketing activity:
79% – Twitter
69% – Facebook
66% – Linkedin
60% – YouTube
53% – Blogs
25% – Proprietary online community
22% – Google+
SHOCKING: Despite its popularity, only 9% of businesses in 2013 said that social media was well integrated into their email activity.
The advantages of integrating social media into your email marketing:
- Create multiple platforms through which to connect with your audience and have an effective promotion mix.
- Allow you to expand the reach of your emails.
- Provide you with key opportunities to grow email data lists.
- Offers email subscribers more options to connect with you, and each other.
- Organic shares and recommends from social media can be used to draw new customers to your brand in a way that email alone cannot.
- Enable you to build up an army of brand influencers and ambassadors.
So for the marriage vows…
I, Marketing Emails, do take you, Social Media, as my lawful wedded spouse. I vow to:
- Include social media icons in all my email communication.
- Incentivise readers to share email content through social media platforms.
- Include ‘Tweet this’ prompts in emails to promote content.
- Promote social media platforms through dedicated emails to my data lists.
- Create compelling multi-media content that my audience will want to share via social media.
- Customise emails to a user’s preferred social platform.
- Use material which has been posted by brand ambassadors on social media sites as a source for future email content.
I, Social Media, do take you, Marketing Emails, as my lawful wedded spouse. I vow to:
- Promote email content and sign-up via social networking sites.
- Use social media competitions, promotions and sweepstakes to grow and refine email data lists.
- Share web-based versions of email content to ensure a wider reach.
- Analyse customers’ social media preferences to influence and target future email messaging.
- Include email / newsletter / blog opt-in forms on social media platforms.
- Use social media initiatives to try out new content and ideas, and add the most successful to future email programmes.
Conclusion:
Widespread use of social media has undoubtedly increased marketing workloads, but failure to integrate social media into your email strategy risks diluting the impact of both media.