Email marketing has always been one of the most profitable and revered styles of digital marketing. For every $1 spent on digital marketing, teams can expect roughly $36 back, demonstrating just how effective this strategy can be. While email marketing still reins one of the top marketing styles, they are certainly not the only contender in the space.
Social media marketing is another marketing strategy that’s commonly used across the world. As the average American spends around 2.7 hours on social media per day, there is a massive opportunity to enter this market.
Although some marketing teams focus on these two areas as completely distinct marketing spheres, they can actually be used very effectively in tandem. In this article, we’ll look at how you can move customers from email marketing onto your social media platforms, helping to flourish on both marketing platforms.
In no time, you’ll be able to create a cross-platform marketing strategy that uses content from each stream to bolster the other. Let’s get right into it.
What should I include in my email marketing to boost social media following?
Email marketing has been around for a lot longer than social media, meaning that companies have had more of an opportunity to expand into this area. Even for companies that have only recently started, building a social media following can often be a harder road to go down. While users might give their email to your business to get access to a particular resource or sign up for an account, they’ll be more hesitant to hit the follow button on Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok.
Helping to move customers that are already signed up for your email marketing list over to social media is often much easier than simply starting from scratch. Being able to craft email marketing pages that direct traffic toward your social media will help to boost engagement there, as well as increase your follower count.
Here are five core strategies that you can use within email marketing to move people over to your social media pages:
- Follow Us Buttons
- Cross-Platform Promotions
- Social Sharing Buttons
- Social Media Widgets
- Live Social Media reminder Widgets
Let’s break these down further.
Follow Us buttons
Not to be mistaken with social media widgets, follow us buttons are normally placed in the upper banner of a marketing email. These are put into every single marketing template, ensuring that whenever an employee creates one, you’ll instantly include a push toward your social media.
By incorporating these follow us buttons, you create a call to action which may pull clients toward your social media pages. Follow us buttons are a small but useful tool to include within your marketing emails.
Cross-platform promotions
Social media and email marketing can work fantastically together. Within an email campaign, you’re able to highlight top comments you’ve received on social media. While providing social proof for your product, this also demonstrates to your email audience that you’re active on social media.
A featured spotlight from a funny or interesting comment on one of your social media pages may push users to go and check out more content. Equally, they could then want to be featured, especially if you offer an incentive for the post. With these additional reasons to check out your social media platforms, people may click on your Follow Us button and check out your pages.
Social sharing buttons
Social sharing buttons allow you to move people from any of your marketing content streams directly to social media. While most commonly used within blog content in the form of a Share This or Like This Post button, you can also use this within email marketing.
By having short content marketing elements on your email, you can include social sharing buttons. With this, anyone that finds your email content interesting can automatically post it to their social media pages. By doing this, people will generate more brand awareness for your company while directly interacting with you on their chosen social media platform.
Social media widgets
When you’re creating a free email signature using a generator, there are normally social media fields. Simply add links to the accounts that you want to connect, and the generator will automatically create this for you.
Once you’ve done that, you just need to paste your email signature into your email provider, or set it up correctly on the settings page. This is by far one of the easiest changes you can make to your email marketing format that will help to divert more traffic toward your social media pages.
This is all about convenience – people don’t want to have to type in your social media handle into the search bar. They want instant access, with these icons providing an easy method of diverting them to the correct page.
Live social media reminder widgets
A few years ago, businesses started to use live social media trackers within emails to bring a little bit of variation to their emails. These live trackers would ping a social media account, instantly updating the email with the most recent tweets from the account. By including one of these widgets in some of your marketing emails, you’re able to frame your account as an energetic and bustling space.
Customers that see your social media page as a place with continual updates and useful information are going to be much more likely to click on your page. While ‘Follow us on Twitter might catch the attention of some users, a live demonstration of what they can expect on your social media pages is even better.
Once a month, you can release a marketing email that completely focuses on social media, with this being one of the most crucial elements that you can include.
Final thoughts
Most companies have spent years building up a mailing list of 1000s of people they can freely contact over email. Email marketing is a hugely successful strategy, but it’s not one that exists in a vacuum. Social media and email can be used in tandem together, each enriching the other. Not only does this boost the speed with which you can build your email marketing list and social media account, but it also cuts down on the total amount of content you’ll need to produce.
By recycling social media posts into email marketing templates and vice versa, you’ll be in a perfect position to scale your content marketing. When used in tandem, social media and email marketing can complement each other, helping you to holistically build up your brand.
