Social Media + Email Marketing. A marriage made in heaven or a marriage of convenience?
At their most basic, both email and social media are simply communication channels through which you can contact your audience. How we use them is key and there is no question that used together, the results can be greater than the ‘sum of the parts’. However, what should you use? Social Media or Email marketing? You shouldn’t just think more is better and simply sign up for every social media account you can find and try to use them all. If you are aiming to build real relationships with your target market, quality is at least as important as quantity. Email marketing opens up real opportunities for businesses to connect with their customer base. Communication options include newsletters, press releases, and incentives that will attract traffic to a website, like discounts on services and/or products. This marketing activity can be expanded by taking the message to social media platforms (such as Twitter) that can leverage an email campaign to see it distributed beyond your mailing list. There is greater scope to personalise your email messages but you will always be limited to communicating with those people you have on your database. The hierarchical nature of Social Media offers great potential to spread you message more widely as your friends tell their friends. This sounds like it could be a great combination but it is easy to forget:
What’s In It For Me?
If people who receive your messages don’t find them interesting and relevant, they will switch off. Just because you have something you want to say doesn’t mean people will want to listen….
The Ripple Effect
An email campaign certainly reaches your email subscribers and can even be forwarded to friends and colleagues; however the message gains real momentum when a company’s subscribers use their social media to pass the news on to their followers. This ripple effect then becomes never ending. However, don’t just try to engage with all your audience on all of their social media presence. This post gives some advice.
Joined-up
Combining social media and email marketing to spread your communication across different channels is also a good way to distribute information without bombarding contacts with emails. Where it would probably be frustrating to find multiple emails from the same company in your inbox, social media followers want to know what a company is up to. Mixing things up is especially important; linking to a number of different items – within reason – will attract different groups of people and help spread the word about a company’s latest news. Irrespective of which platforms might work for you, it’s paramount for a company to create a healthy relationship between email marketing and social media; together, these two marketing methods can generate a powerful awareness about your products and services while keeping the company connected to both existing and potential customers.
