Some of the most successful businesses take a holistic approach to their digital marketing strategy. This results in a stronger brand image, and a customer experience that is integrated.

According to some studies, the average customer has about 10 touch points with a brand before they actually make a purchase, which means that being present in as many places as possible will help to make it easier for your business to increase your leads and sales.

If you consider the two most widely used (and most effective) digital channels for acquiring customers – email and social media, the first thing that comes to mind is the question of which one is better.

But both channels have unique features, and when you integrate them in your marketing, you can make your overall strategy twice as strong.

Although it’s been here for quite a while, email is still as effective as ever.

Social media is another entity that has been around a long time and yet continues to provide great results when it comes to driving visitors to your site and increasing leads and sales.

In today’s world, you cannot focus on just one and ignore the other. You need both, and one of the best ways to get the most out of them is to integrate them.

Whether you currently derive the majority of your web traffic from email or from social media, read on to find out why and how you should use email and social media together to drive more traffic in 2023.

The Benefits of Integrating Email and Social Media

The reason why these two entities complement each other is simple. Each one grows the other’s reach because the two channels serve very different contexts to your different target audience sections.

That’s why it’s best to design a marketing campaign which takes advantage of the strength of both email and social media.

Using these two huge channels in tandem will help you grow your list faster and extend your email reach significantly while still interacting with the segment of your audience (such as the younger crowd) that hangs out on various social media platforms.

You can integrate email and social marketing in four ways:

1. Retarget Your Email Subscribers on Social Networks

You have the option of uploading your contact list to any major social site.

This is a great way of putting faces to the people who already know and like your brand (since they signed up for your subscriber list).

Putting faces to those names is important because it will help you to deepen relationships with your prospects and customers when you connect and engage with them on the social media platforms.

Their feeds will also give you more information about their needs, which will be a huge help when it comes to creating blog posts, designing products, and so on.

You’ll be able to have a deeper insight into their pain points so that you can effectively address them.

Running ads on Facebook or Twitter is quite expensive, which means that if you want your retargeting campaign to be successful, then you have to be deliberate about where and how you spend your marketing funds.

By retargeting the people who have already shown interest in whatever it is you are offering, you’ll get much better conversion rates and eliminate the odds of displaying irrelevant ads to the people in your audience.

To set up your retargeting campaign to reach interested subscribers, you simply have to install a tracking code on your website and then if you send an email to your subscribers which results in them landing on your site, you’ll now be able to specifically target your ads to only those people who clicked on that page.

2. Invite Your Fans And Followers on Social Media To Your Email Community

Traffic from your social media generally has an engagement rate that is lower than email.

It also has a higher bounce rate.

This means that measuring the results from your social marketing efforts can prove to be quite tricky.

You also don’t have control over those properties you have on social media, which means that Facebook, Twitter, or other platforms could decide to shut your page down for some violation of its guidelines, and you’d lose all the work you put into building up your fan base and engaging them on the social platform.

This is why email starts to look pretty good compared to social media.

But it doesn’t mean that you have to go out and kill your social pages. Yet another way to get the benefits from both channels is to collect the emails of your fans and followers on social media.

Social sites can also have a massive impact on your lead generation and on boosting your business’s brand awareness, but email will likely always be the most prized asset in any business.

By inviting your social followers to join your list, you’re deepening your bond with them as email is a much more personal medium for communicating with them.

Also, because you’ve already connected on social media, this will increase your opt-in rates significantly, as well as boost your bottom line.

After all, email has a much higher CLV (customer lifetime value) than any of the social platforms.

3. Build A Social Community For Special Customers

You can use this strategy to build up a massive list of names.

You can create exclusive groups on Facebook, for instance, and then offer a free lead magnet, and those who want to access the private group and become privileged subscribers can do so by emailing at least two friends about your lead magnet.

This type of community also has the advantage of always attracting a lot of engagement on posts.

Your email list of subscribers is made up of some of your most loyal audience members and the likelihood is high that they will want to join your VIP group if you ask them.

But it’s vital that you moderate your group and make sure that there is no spam.

If possible, try to avoid any type of self-promotion there, as well.

Only post useful, valuable content that will keep your members active and engaged, and do your best to encourage comments on posts.

Groups on LinkedIn perform just as well and are likely to provide just as much exposure for your business as Facebook groups. In fact, some marketers believe that LinkedIn groups feature is the most powerful one on the platform which you can use in building your business.

4. Use Social Sharing In Your Email

This will help you generate even more traffic to your site. If you periodically send out email newsletters to your subscribers, you can use them to increase your content’s social reach.

If you haven’t tried it before, now is the time to include social share icons right inside your email newsletters.

Social sharing can boost your CTR by up to 150%. Provide Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest share icons in your newsletters to make it easy for your readers to share your content.

Getting those share icons on your emails is easy, but it’s important to keep in mind that not all email providers are going to display the social icon images.

This means that when you place them in your email, you need to create alt text for each of the icons.

To get the optimum results, you should test the social sharing buttons for where your key audience hangs out primarily using various placements of the buttons on the page.

Click to Tweet snippets are also a great way of making it easier for your audience to share your content on Twitter.

If one of your current business goals is to build up your social following, then you can even include a call to action to your social platforms in the confirmation letter of your newsletter.

As with all other channels, you need to incentivize your audience to share your emails to improve your results. For instance, you could offer a prize for a few random subscribers who share your email on social networks.

How To Use Social Media To Reduce The Loss Of Email Subscribers

No one wants to lose email subscribers, but it happens all the time no matter how well you’re doing with your list building efforts.

Maybe the subscriber’s inbox is cluttered and he simply decides to bid goodbye to your newsletter for that reason alone.

There’s nothing you can do in situations like that, but you can offer the people who unsubscribe from your emails a chance to reconnect with you on social media.

All you have to do is provide them with links to whichever social platforms you’re active on.

You could also offer people who unsubscribe a chance to get one of your exclusive lead magnets or something like that.

It’s a pretty smart tactic of getting them to continue their relationship with your business or brand even if they don’t want to receive your emails anymore.

You can even try a unique and memorable approach such as a comical meme or YouTube video embedded on your page, where you ask the people who are unsubscribing to follow you on social media.

You’re also able to invite your viewers on YouTube to join your list with the use of associated site annotation – but you’re first going to have to verify your account with YouTube in order to access this feature.

Once that’s done, you’re going to be able to send viewers from your YouTube videos directly to your landing page.

Is Your Organic Reach on Facebook Declining?

If you have noticed that your organic Facebook reach keeps declining, you’re not alone.

This is something that has been happening for a while now, and it will continue to decline even in the future.

Facebook wants to make money from businesses which means that now you have to pay for attention on their site.

This means that if you want more organic eyeballs on your content, then you have to work much harder to get them:

• One of the things you might consider doing is engaging your list of subscribers with a poll on your page.
• You can also send out popular status updates to your list to increase engagement on your page.
• Another tactic is to highlight some of your popular updates from Twitter and other social networks in your email campaigns.

There are countless more things you can do to make the most of your integration of these two marketing channels.

However, the most important thing is to keep in mind that while both of them are important for helping you reach your business goals, email is an asset that you have total control over while your social media page actually belongs to someone else.

Also, email offers a much higher return on your investment of time and effort.

The Bottom Line

A recent marketing survey shows that more and more businesses are spending the bulk of their marketing budget on email marketing and social media.

But instead of focusing on each of them separately, you should take your customer relationships to another level by marrying the two.

Social media is a great platform that enables you to connect and interact with your target audience quickly and easily. Use it to build a brand for your business that is friendly and approachable.

But email still is the most profitable channel available to marketers right now, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon.

Most big businesses derive a huge chunk of their revenue from email. So, use the two channels together, but keep the facts mentioned above in mind when making your decisions about where to spend your time and marketing budget.

There is no limit as to how creative you can get with such cross-channel email/social marketing campaigns.

Get the best outcome by allowing both channels to work in tandem. You can start by incorporating a few of the methods mentioned in this post to help you start building your integrated email/social network campaign.

This will open the doors to higher engagement rates and ultimately higher sales for your business.

Feel free to post your comment below.  An email address is required but it will not be shared with anyone, put on any list, or used for any kind of marketing, just to alert you if there are any replies. Thanks and happy hunting!

PlanetBizOp.com

->Steven

Updated: Originally published January 8th 2019