3 Ways to Make Your Email More Social
We’ve all heard rumors that email marketing is dead and social media is the new king of the hill for customer engagement. But, we’ve seen that by integrating social media into your emails, you create a win-win and are able to effectively share your voice with millions of people in your target audience and beyond.
When we recently surveyed our customers we heard loud and clear that they were using Facebook and Twitter, but well over half cited a lack of time and knowledge of the channels as challenges.
So, if you’re crunched for time and want to get the most bang for your efforts, consider these 3 simple steps to make your emails more social:
- Include share buttons or links in your emails. Each week, we send out our VR Buzz newsletter and we always include button links to tweet or like the main articles. We are able to get greater exposure when they are shared on Facebook and Twitter.
- Include social media icons linked to your pages in your emails. We see our customers, like Lucky Bums do this very effectively and it’s a great way to grow your followers and likes. Ensure you also have a link to forward to a friend or to sign up for your email list so when your email gets shared, your new customers can easily sign up too.
- Lastly, include something unique and of value for your social media audience such as Facebook or Twitter only specials. You’ll gain new followers and subscribers by providing relevant offers and content that makes you stand out from your competition. VerticalResponse customer, Fiddlesticks did this well during the holidays announcing special deals and free shipping.
© 2011 – 2018, Contributing Author. All rights reserved.
I’d be interested to learn if others have found ways to get their email recipients to share the email itself. “Forward to a friend” hasn’t really worked for us too well in the past.
These are good points. Another idea is to truly mix in social content into emails…Add customer photos and stories (testimonials) at the bottom of your email campaigns, or quotes from your company facebook wall. Additionally, some sites are showing the profile icons of 8 of their facebook fans under a title that says “66,433 People Like ___”
While social media may be growing, email is still king. People treat email almost as a family member. They sign up for email newsletters only for those things that they are really interested in. They may follow all kinds of people and businesses on Twitter and Facebook, but they only stay connected through email with just a few. If you happen to be within their “circle of trust” and have them as an email subscriber, you are well on your way.
A well… probably the best advice to make your content go viral, is to produce content which is shareble. I mean: write usefull content, which your target audience is willing to share with their freinds, familiy, collegues or clients. That’s probably the hardest issue of them all…