Email Marketing in the Age of Social Media

A lot of people believe that email marketing is dead in the age of social media. Others argue that social media is highly overrated and that we should rely on email marketing instead. The response to both these groups always is ‘why can’t we just use them both?’ For seriously, together they can be far more effective than they can be separate – a real case of the combination being better than its parts.

Email Marketing and Social Media

This is down to the fact that each has a different advantage. When you use social media it is far easier to engage with new customers. This is because you can approach them through shares and other paid advertisement campaigns. Email marketing, in the meantime, has proven 40 times more effective at getting new customers. Why is that? Because the people that you approach have already decided they trust you enough to sign up and are therefore far more likely to read the entirety of the emails you send them.

Okay. That sounds pretty good, right? So how do you do that?

How to Leverage Social Media?

It’s the word ‘social’ that’s the most important word here. People don’t go to social media in order to buy new products. Instead, they go on there to interact with their friends and to demonstrate to others how interesting and cool they are.

For that reason, social media is best used as a fun, entertaining way that makes your brand and your company seem creative and worth following. Just as importantly, you’ll want to make sure your message is much shorter as very few people are going to sit around and devour long-form messages on social media. It’s all about digestibility.

Get Them to Subscribe

One of the things you’ll regularly want to share with your social media followers is the fact that you have a newsletter. Even better, offer them products and goods that are interesting to them – like white papers as well as guides for them to learn or do something that is associated with your brand. All you’ll want them to give you in return is their email address.

The reason this works better than just asking them for their email address when they visit your site is that you’ve already won their trust to an extent. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be following you on social media in the first place. And so, when you ask their email address in return for a product that they’re interested in, you’ll see that you’ll have a much higher success rate than you otherwise would have. The one thing you do have to remember at all times is not to ask for too much information. The more information that you ask, the more likely that they’ll decide not to go through with it.

What Can You Offer?

Of course, different people will be interested in different things. For this reason, to get the more of your social media followers to also subscribe to your email, don’t be afraid to try out new things. The best bet is to offer them whatever you’re sending through your email marking campaign anyway. Just make sure that when you do, that you don’t offer it to them at exactly the same time as you offer it to them over email, as then many will start to wonder if they’re experiencing any sort of advantage by staying subscribed.

There is another advantage to now hitting them up simultaneously, and that is that you’ll be able to see what product that you’re offering over email – be it college essay help or email marketing strategies – will be most effectively offered as an incentive for getting people to subscribe to your letter. For example, you might think that you’ve written up a very useful guide, but if you then find that nobody in your email list actually downloads it, you know you might have to go back to the drawing board and try again.

Don’t Forget to Also Create Social Media Versions of Your Newsletter

No, it won’t be the most effective part of your strategy. Still, almost all email marketing programs now allow you to create social media versions of your email. So why not take the extra step and offer it to them? It’s a small step that might just draw a few more people into your actual email marketing campaign.

Again, it is always worth considering when you want to send out the email and when you want to send it out over social media. A good strategy that will often work well is to make clear that whatever promotions are on offer in your email marketing campaigns are only available to people who have subscribed to your campaign or which have a limited window of opportunity (which is close to expiring by the time you place your email on social media). These simple strategies will make it far more likely that people will subscribe to your email – which can then lock them in for sales further down the line.

Final Words

Email marketing is not dead and social media has not taken over. Quite the contrary. The two techniques instead help each other out and – dare I say it? – create synergy. This means they can create a very effective strategy with the wide reach of the one aiding the penetration and sales power of the other. In this way, they can form an incredibly effective combination that is highly advisable to anybody trying to sell any kind of product. So give them both a try. You won’t regret it.