With all the hype surrounding social media marketing these days, it’s easy to forget that email marketing has always been inherently social.
With many brands rushing to execute an integrated social media strategy to engage customers and potential customers, it’s important to leverage the social impact of email into your strategy as well. Email is already a powerful social marketing tool that can speak directly to customers and prospects, even though many times it’s not regarded as such. Its content can be customized to address known interests, and the frequency can be controlled so that data arrives at intervals that recipients appreciate. Email can be the springboard in distributing your message into the social realm.
In integrating email into your social marketing strategy, it starts with providing the meat of your message through email, then leveraging other aspects of the social ecosystem to take advantage of so-called “social momentum.” For example, a brand could establish a virtuous social marketing cycle wherein content could be created for an email newsletter or blog post, sent out via email, programmatically tweeted or memed, and posted on Facebook. From here, the content continues to reach new people through social momentum.
As another example, a brand could encourage visitors to register for informational newsletters from Facebook and then link back to Facebook from the newsletters. As newsletter recipients or Facebook fans forwarded content, the virtuous cycle could potentially generate more and more relationships (registrations) at an increasing rate, enabling the brand to find and engage new prospects using the perpetual motion of social media.
Though some regard email marketing as a legacy marketing channel, it should be noted that email will always maintain its relevancy no matter what so-called “new media” channel arise. Social media is a prime example- through strategic planning and integration, email and social media can leverage the benefits of one another to create deeply engaging and long-lasting benefits for your brand.