7 top tips to integrate email with social media

Social media is the latest buzzword in the marketing industry. But social media does not work well in isolation. By integrating your social media activity with your email marketing, you can improve the effectiveness and results from both disciplines, bringing outstanding bottom-line results.

Unfortunately many marketers just aren’t taking this on board. In fact, our recent Hitting the Mark study found that only 17% of email marketers from the UK’s top retailers included social media sharing links in their emails (read the full report here).

Here are my seven top tips to better integrating email and social media marketing:

1. Include ‘share on social network’ links in your email messages – chances are, your email recipients will have many like-minded friends on social networks that could also be potential customers. Encourage them to share your email content with their friends by including ‘sharing’ links in your email newsletters.

2. Encourage social media ‘followers’ and ‘fans’ to sign-up to your email newsletters – the reverse is also true: you probably have lots of followers on Twitter or fans on Facebook that would be interested in receiving your email newsletters. Have you asked them? If not, why not!

3. Use blog posts as content for email newsletters – by using your blog posts in your email newsletters, you not only have a great source of wonderful content, you also raise the profile of your blog and encourage your recipients to check it out!

4. Add social network ‘subscribe’ buttons to your email messages – if recipients like the content in your newsletter, then they are likely to be potentially interested in following you on social networks too, so make it easy for them

5. Ask for social media details during sign-up – you ask for a range of contact information when recipients sign-up to receive information from you. So why not ask for their social network details as well? And if they give them to you, make sure you follow them and add them to your CRM database.

6. Use metrics from email campaigns to identify most popular social networks – your email platform should be able to give you a range of metrics, allowing you to see which of your recipients added your content to which social networks. This will give you very valuable information relating to the social networks that are the most popular, helping you to focus future activity.

7. Ask for feedback – stuck for content for your next newsletter or just keen to get some reaction to your latest email? Why not ask your community on social media? Get them more involved and make them feel part of the process.

Have you tried any of these? Are there other tactics you find work well? Let us know in the comments!

Tink Taylor is Managing Director at dotMailer. He blogs on the dotDigital Blog.

This article originally appeared at the dotDigital Blog