When it comes to your company’s integrated marketing strategy, there’s a good chance you’re using social media and email marketing to deliver and share brand-related content and messaging. Yet here’s the key question: have you combined the two?
Social channels are powerful digital marketing tools in their own right. But when you combine them with your email marketing messages, you’re more likely to boost your brand’s visibility, engagement and reach. By effectively utilizing your Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn presence, you’re not only reaching out to people through e-mail—you’re also connecting with them on different networking platforms, which increases the chance that your audience will respond to your messaging.
We recently stumbled on an infographic by GetResponse that shows just how digital marketers are integrating social media and e-mail—and the effectiveness of these decisions, too. Some of the facts we found most interesting include:
- Average email click-through rates show Linkedin has a 9.6% CTR, Facebook, 5.4%, Twitter, 5.0%. Emails with no social sharing only had a 2.6% CTR.
- 18.3% of e-mail marketers use sharing links in their e-mails.
- A whopping 91.3% of e-mail marketers include Facebook sharing links in a message.
- Over half of email marketers (51.9%) only use 1 social sharing icon per message. A diminuitive 7.4% use 3 icons, while 0.1% use 4 or more social sharing icons.
Sure, it’s fun to look at data—but you know us better than that by now, right? What’s more important are the tips and best practices you can glean from a pile of stats. A clear lesson here is to include social sharing in your emails! And after all, this makes perfect sense, right? You wouldn’t publish a blog post without including multiple ways for people to share your content with their various networks.
The same goes for email. Emails, after all, are content. And you want your email messages to be distributed to your audience (and prospective clients, too) so that you can share your information and resources with as many people as possible.
If you use an email marketing program like MailChimp or ExactTarget, built-in social sharing is available—all it takes is a couple clicks of the mouse to set it up. And now that you’ve optimized your message with your various networks, make it easy for people to get this important information. Include a prominent email subscription box on your website that lets people know where they can sign up to have information delivered straight to their inboxes.
And while you’re optimizing your email marketing strategy for social integration, don’t overlook your own emails. We’re big fans of the WiseStamp plug-in – not only can you add direct links to your social channels as part of your email signature, but it also pulls in your most recent blog post. Talk about an easy way to boost your content distribution!
Of course, it’s important to remember that your work is far from done. Keep an eye on your email marketing analytics. How many people are clicking on your various networks? Are those numbers changing as you send more emails? Let the data guide you as you continue to refine not only the content of each message, but your overall strategy, too.
Do you include social networks as part of your email marketing? What sort of response have you’ve seen so far? Is your experience in line with the results listed in the infographic?
Image by Biscarotte via Creative Commons
Shelly Kramer is a Principal Analyst and Founding Partner at Futurum Research. A serial entrepreneur with a technology centric focus, she has worked alongside some of the world’s largest brands to embrace disruption and spur innovation, understand and address the realities of the connected customer, and help navigate the process of digital transformation. She brings 20 years’ experience as a brand strategist to her work at Futurum, and has deep experience helping global companies with marketing challenges, GTM strategies, messaging develoment, and driving strategy and digital transformation for B2B brands across multiple verticals. Shelly’s coverage areas include Collaboration/CX/SaaS, platforms, ESG, and Cybersecurity, as well as topics and trends related to the Future of Work, the transformation of the workplace and how people and technology are driving that transformation. A transplanted New Yorker, she has learned to love life in the Midwest, and has firsthand experience that some of the most innovative minds and most successful companies in the world also happen to live in “flyover country.”
