Integrating Email and Social Media

It’s that time of year again when we must shift our focus to ensure that our email campaigns are given an extra boost during the festive season. Focus on factors like standing out in a crowded inbox and making the festive retail experience easier and more convenient for customers.

For me, the key during this time of year is to effectively nudge your customers further down the purchase path. Although this path may be different for everyone, there is a common thread - word-of-mouth, a friend’s recommendation or a thumbs up from an influencer are trust factors that can provide that extra boost and email is a great channel to encourage that. 

According to a study from Nielsen, 92% of consumers around the world say that they trust word-of-mouth, as well as friend and family recommendations above all other forms of advertising. 

That being said, we can’t ignore the benefits of integrating social media and email for festive campaigns.

6 Ways to Integrate Email and Social Media

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1. Follow and Like

• Encourage your email subscribers to join your social communities. Subscribers are already engaging with your products online via email, so they really are a valuable group from which you can grow your community.
• Placing social icons and call to actions on promotional emails, newsletters and welcome triggers is a great first step to integration. It’s also a good idea to A/B test the placement of the icons to see what works best.
• Another way to grow your social community is using adhoc email campaigns where the product, competition or sale is only available on social media. This way all the great but ‘spammy’ competition and discount sale jargon that would usually get the email stopped by spam filters, is on the Facebook campaign page. You don’t have to add it to your email copy. Here is an example from Bon Appétit

2. Share Content

• Adding Share functionality gives your customer the ability to share certain or all content onto their preferred social networks. It facilitates the dissemination of key content from the email onto social media networks in a manner relevant to the network chosen. This ultimately extends the life of your content. Just be sure to only add share functionality to content that is actually shareworthy.
• Make use of share copy that includes hashtags or @ signs to allow your customers' followers to easily join the conversation or view the festive promotion. But remember to consider the overall social media content strategy or have your social media community manager write the share copy.
• Tracking and measuring the extended reach of share functionality is very important.

In this recent eBucks example, they used share functionality to spread the word about travel deals.

3. Pinterest

• Allow customers to pin great looking images from your email, especially if you have a high volume of female subscribers. This way your branded content will live in the customer’s digital space. According to Media Bistro, 80% of pins are re-pins, and 21% of users have purchased an item that they found on the site says PriceGrabber.
• An image that is supported by alt text, well placed and properly coded can be worth a thousand words.

4. Pre-seeding Announce upcoming email campaigns using a twitter update or Facebook post. Create a teaser tweet about a daily deal, and then post the sign-up link. 

This tactic can result in increased open rates and convert followers into subscribers. 

Boost your festive season promotions by integrating your #email & #socialmedia campaigns! Look out for our... http://t.co/6QNeeu5OPH

— eBilling, eMarketing (@Striata) October 15, 2013

5. Grow your subscriber database Social media platforms offer an opportunity to grow your email subscriber database. Whether it is a sign up from on your Facebook tab or just a link to your preference centre on twitter. 

You should then tailor your emails based on where the customer signed up. 

6. Content Curation Include content from social media to email campaigns. Have a ‘what’s hot & trending’ section. The festive season is a great time to add customer testimonials to your promotional emails.

Customer compliments and recommendations, even a tally of Facebook ‘likes’ placed on a daily deal during November and December can increase sales, because we know that customers trust peer recommendations. 

Attract customers with short, enticing messages on your social media platforms, and then use email to paint a picture or promote products with great visuals or demo videos.

To learn more about Striata Share and Social Media integration, you can follow and send a Direct Message to @Striataor @sl_collins 

Sheryl-Lynn Collins
striata.com