Building relationships is where social media can become so beneficial to businesses; posting consistent content in line with a company’s image and branding helps users to get a feel for the business and its personality, therefore becoming more trustworthy and connected. As well as the content, having the ability to instantly reply to people and create discussions on topics using hashtags and the latest trends are all excellent for growing impressions and engagement.
Email marketing on the other hand is less responsive and conversational, but great for promoting and sharing your products and services with contacts. The strength of email marketing is that your contacts have subscribed and given permission to be sent marketing emails, meaning there’s prior knowledge and awareness of your business. Therefore the emails being sent out can be much more direct and conversion-focused.
Social media and email marketing integration allows them to benefit each other and increase conversions, brand awareness and engagement.
1. Expanding the reach
The first and most likely least surprising benefit of social media and email marketing integration is the ability it gives to expand your reach. Including links to your social accounts within an email campaign, perhaps at the bottom in the footer allows readers of the email to find out more about your business. The CTA in the email might be heavily tailored to conversions, which some readers might not be receptive to at this stage. Providing them the option to visit your social media platforms from the email may be more enticing. They could then give you a follow in order to stay up to date with future company news and updates.
2. Providing options
Following on expanding the reach, another benefit of including social media links in email campaigns is simply that people are all different in terms of how active they are on various channels. If a reader of the email is somebody who uses Twitter on a daily basis, they might be more likely to click the Twitter link in your email. The same can be applied to any social media platform and this freedom for readers to choose which platform they want to visit will only reflect positively on your business.
3. A new platform for engagement
Emails may be interacted with by people yet they may not have intention of progressing further along the buyer’s journey via conversion. However, you can encourage readers to follow you on social media platforms, in a much more casual and less sales-focused manner. If users are to follow you on social media, it gives you a new platform to communicate with them and share promotional content and company news. It essentially gives another channel to reach your email contacts, and perhaps if they are a frequent social media user, this new channel may be more effective.
4. Growing your contact list
The final main benefit of social media and email marketing integration involves the contact list, or subscription list. They need to be large enough to provide reliable analytics, indicating which campaigns worked better than others, and how readers interacted with them. This is a major aspect of email marketing, learning from previous campaigns to improve new ones. Social media can be used to promote contact forms on the website which lead to people subscribing to newsletters and emails, as well as sharing the actual email content itself. Promoting emails that have valuable information or perhaps exclusive promotional codes and discounts will help encourage people to sign up for them.
Conclusion
Social media and email marketing are two of the most effective and important digital marketing channels. They’ve proven over many years to engage users online and generate conversions in a range of industries. Like many digital marketing channels, when used together, new benefits become apparent and these can be used to further enhance your digital marketing strategies.
About Inflowing
Inflowing is a B2B marketing agency. We help B2B organisations do meaningful things with marketing. Whether that’s getting more leads, more visibility, or supporting their sales teams.
We’re an experienced team of marketers with an incredibly strong background in B2B. To learn more about B2B and improving your marketing, check out our other blogs or get in touch.
To be notified when we post another article, follow us on social media!
