Integrating Social Media with email and direct marketing
Business marketing used to be so much simpler in the good old days! You placed your advertisements in the newspapers, magazines, on billboards, TV and radio. Direct marketing consisted of employing people to post flyers through people’s letterboxes. Now in the new digital world you need to take email and social media into consideration if you want to increase your profits and increase your brand recognition.
Here are a few tips to help you integrate social media with email and direct marketing so that you have a more effective marketing strategy:
• Email customers with an offer that can only be redeemed through social media, thereby directing them to your social media page. As soon as customers start redeeming , you can monitor which are their preferred channels of engagement and which sites are most popular, which will enable you to tailor your emails accordingly.
• Include ‘share-to-social’ icons with your email campaigns. If you do this on each article in your newsletter, this allows the customer to choose which stories they want to share.
• Give customers an incentive to share, for example, discounts and vouchers.
• Think about social sharing when writing email content, make it relevant and interesting, and suitable for social channels, for example, make the subject lines and headlines short and concise for Twitter.
• Use visuals wherever possible, people love photos! People are more receptive to infographics, pictures and video than articles, and your message is more likely to achieve better engagement rates from people your audience shares with.
• Encourage people to sign up for your newsletter via your social channels. Have a newsletter sign-up form on Facebook, promote your newsletter on Twitter with a link to a subscription form.
• Regular posts are key to raising your profile, so make sure you post/tweet at least once a day as a raised profile will lead ultimately to increased profits.
There are strengths to social media, email marketing and direct marketing but by far the most profitable strategy is to combine the power of all three. Integrating direct mail, email and social media in today’s busy marketing world takes consideration of your unique business. Being aware of your customers’ needs is the first step to successful marketing and the key to successful marketing is matching the customer to the product or service. This will enable you to communicate with your audience in the right place for them and with relevant tailored content.
