Sync your Social and Email in Five easy steps

Time to Sync Your Social and Email

Now more than ever us marketers should be realizing how important and powerful email is. At the same time, we should also be realizing how important social media has become and that it should be a part of a marketer’s daily routine. Email marketers are realizing that social has become an integral part of the email process. Time to sync your social and email strategies.

There are five key insights that all email marketers need to come to terms with. These insights will truly revolutionize the way we think about email and social, and how they are undeniably perfect when they work together towards a common goal.

One thing we need to realize when working with social is that it isn’t just for your core audience. First you need to recognize why these two mediums are different and you also need to understand that they are intended for two different types of audiences.

Social media primarily focuses on how useful it is as a tool to retain an audience. Much of what is said about social is true, but email does a far better job at retaining an audience than social does.

An average email open rate is about 30% while the average Facebook page reaches about only 16% percent of its intended audience. Another thing to keep in mind is that the average Twitter CTR is just 1.64%, while the average email CTR is roughly 3.5%.

Also, moving forward we need to realize that what is popular on social isn’t popular by email. If you want to make a sale, your social following re-sharing your posts and quotes aren’t going to be enough to sell people on your product or service.

With Facebook organizing the way people’s feed is being viewed it may hard for other audiences to view your content. Nowadays, sharing and relevancy are at odds, and you need to be able to mediate content carefully. This is where trusty email chimes in, so just because your content isn’t shareable or relevant on Facebook, that doesn’t mean it won’t be on email.

Do we all understand now that email and social are like two different people? Lucky for them opposites do attract, which makes them a perfect pairing, but now that we have established that these two mediums are different we can move on to battle the fear of culture shock. Time to sync your social and email.

You may be asking yourself, how do we prevent culture shock from occurring?

Your ultimate goal is for social and email to work together as a team to drive consumers to your product, so you need to appear to others as multifaceted rather than hypocritical. Sync your social and email.

The key to making this work is to treat your blog and your social account for what they are, which are different places. You should consider posting links to some of your blog posts. Doing this will allow people to get away from social media and on to your site.

Also, you might want to make the image you are sharing with your blog interesting and reflective of your blog content. Another thing to consider is making two different types of blog posts, one for social, and another set of blog posts for your hardcore followers.

Once you get a hold on some of these visitors’ emails, you should consider sending them messages, and other content that may be of interest to them. Focus on more social-friendly blog posts until their behavior suggests that they are interested in more in-depth content.

Now that you have this down, you want to start pulling people off Facebook and Twitter and capture their attention. A user can enjoy visiting your site, and they may even come back to visit it on a regular basis, but without the proper incentive, they are unlikely to offer their email address. To put it into more blunt terms, giving your email address out to someone is like spending money on something extremely expensive. You need to offer your consumers something that is worth paying for, or else they won’t buy it.

Lastly, you want to leverage your list to expand your following on social. Once you mix social and email, things will become interesting. You should add social icons or buttons to emails to boost click through rates.

According to research done by GetResponse, including a social button in your emails increases your click through rate from 2.4% to 6.2%. That is the collaboration of social and email working at its finest folks. That is a 158% lift in CTR.

Another thing to remember if you want your content to be successful on social is that you need an influential person or organization to help expand your reach over time and to retain your initial audience. That second point is extremely important because studies show that each time you post you lose about 20% of your initial audience and this ultimately stops your audience from growing.

Besides from the obvious adding of social buttons on your blog posts and asking your readers to share, the best way to leverage your audience is by embedding your social posts into your blog posts. This will dramatically increase the shareability of your posts.

It’s time to sync your social and email strategies. Want more? Find out why email is still a primary communication tool or learn more about email and social sharing.

 

Patricia Ferreira, Raven5 Ltd, Oakville, Ontario April 2014

 

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