It is really hard these days to acquire conversions by focusing on a single medium. Successful integration of social persona with the email data can help brands generate more conversions at a lesser ROI. Tying up your email subscribers with your social channels can produce some substantial benefits. Hence, the time is just ripe that we start thinking of the channels as a cohesive unit.
Here are some important steps that you should follow in order to make efficient use of social media and email marketing channels.
Upload Subscriber data into Social Channels
It is necessary to simplify the communication process and one of the best ways to do that is to import your email subscribers’ bases into your social channels. This will help to enhance the growth rate of your community by identifying the interests of your targeted audience. You can very easily import the subscriber data into Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus. For finding instructions on how you can do that, head over to this article.
Spread the Social Love and Automate Emails
Email marketing automation is helpful when you are running several email campaigns at the same time like one campaign for leads only, one for your existing clients and one for your seasonal promotions. Email marketing software GetResponse offers a host of features like autoresponders that lets you connect with your audience in a personalized manner offering targeted 1-1 communication. This is a huge time saver apart from maintaining consistency. It helps you to keep track of each email campaign, Facebook post, Tweet, LinkedIn message etc in order to provide you with detailed graph and stats that helps you to further optimize your existing campaigns.
Allow people to Sign Up For Your Newsletter Directly From Twitter
Twitter is a great platform to grow your email lists. Identify the USP of your newsletter and share it with your Twitter audience. Follow the below suggestions in order to generate more signs ups than before using Twitter:
- Tweet about your newsletter and include your sign up link in it.
- Make use of Twitter cards to make your tweets stand out from the rest.
- Add the newsletter sign up link in your Twitter bio.
- Identify niche influencers, retweet their posts, message them and include their handle whenever you are tweeting something that is of value to your influencers. Make sure to include your newsletter subscription link.
Use Personalization – Create a Separate Group For Your Email Subscribers
Prepare separate groups in your social media channels for your regular email subscribers. Share some special offers and incentives to the people included in that group and also publicize the offer in your other social channels because this will encourage other people to sign up for the newsletter in order to gain the incentives provided only to subscribers. User personalization is a great way to increase the number of email subscribers.
In order to make it easier for your audience to share the stuff you mail, try including social sharing widgets in your emails. A Study revealed that the addition of social sharing buttons on the emails actually helped to increase the Clickthrough rates by upto 150%. Make use of tools like “Clicktotweet” within your mails for easy social sharing. Also, don’t forget to include social profile links at the bottom of the mail to grow your fanbase. Tools like WiseStamp can come handy.
Identify influencers and include them in your campaign
Use tools that include metrics like opens, clicks, conversions, etc. Analyze this data and find out who your key influencers are. Next, plan out a dedicated email campaign and send them to your supporters. You won’t believe but this will definitely increase your social visibility. Make use of tools like Klout, Oktopost and BuzzSumo to identify key influencers and plan out a separate strategy connect with them individually.
Create campaigns that encourage more people to share and win collectively. You can ask your existing users to share their positive feedback on social channels and in return you can subscribe them to your monthly discount newsletters. You can even encourage people to get more likes for your products and offer them some extra discount for that. A similar strategy is adopted by SnoopDog fragrances which lowered down the price of a product to upto 30% for to get around 300 likes. Also, don’t hesitate to provide extra incentives to your superfans.
KFC did a good job when they implemented an email sign up widget on their FB page and raised their email subscriptions by more than 30%. Also, it is necessary that your email subscribe pages are well optimized for mobile.
Running a contest on Facebook or offering a free industry report although seems like outdated ways but these can add substantial value if done creatively and intelligently. The key lies in entertaining your audiences instead of boring them.
Do an extensive research on the type of audiences and find out what do they care about and how do they solve their problem. Personas can be for customers, partners, existing users, resellers etc. Linking an email to a user’s social persona automatically makes it stronger resulting in greater insight about the customer based on the social influence scores. People with high social scores can be great match who can help you build up your brand.
Map the customer lifecycle and create a communication plan
A focused marketing plan comprises of a well thought customer lifecycle and a communication plan to reduce the hindrances in effective sharing and feedback. All communications should be focused towards strengthening the brand image.
Customer acquisition and retention plays a crucial role in the entire marketing cycle. Social media can help towards new customer acquisition while emails can prove handy in customer retention. A combination of two when properly aligned with each other can help in keeping the end user satisfied thereby making way for higher ROI.
Email marketing is still not dead! Email marketing campaigns that runs parallel with the social campaigns has greater chances of generating revenue as opposed to when these campaigns are run silo. Hope these tips will come handy in revamping your existing marketing strategy.
Images: “Businessman writing e-marketing terms in front of a business team/Shutterstock.com“
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