The reason why emails are so loved by the marketing team is because, despite its age, it continues to deliver fantastic value; a return on investment of 3800%, which means that you can generate sales of $38 for every $1 invested – definitely not something to be sneezed at. While it is a proven fact that email serves to encourage your customers to engage better with your brand, customers are also interacting with the brand in a number of other ways; pay-per-click advertisements, content marketing as well as social media; all are being used by smart marketers to influence and engage customers.
It is natural that when all or some of the channels come together, they assume a powerful force to changing the way a customer behaves. Email marketing can,for example, complement social media to take your marketing to a different level altogether.
The Reason Why a Holistic View Is Taken By the More Successful Brands
The reason why some brands are so successful is because they are able to merge all their marketing efforts to create a matchless customer experience. These brands believe that email marketing and social media can be used together for a more powerful effect. When a business takes a holistic view of digital marketing and communication, the connections it provides to customers become seamless. It does not matter to the customer whether she is interacting with the company through Twitter or across the counter or even replying to an email in the inbox because the company is able to respond to the situation equally competently, irrespective of the channel.
A lot of marketing effort can be negatively impacted when a brand is unable to offer this seamless experience because its marketing teams may not be coordinating with each other making it impossible to properly communicate and launch new marketing initiatives. Campaign execution and promotion may become so difficult that a sense of helpless frustration can set in amongst the team members. Among the moves that can set such a situation right is the integration of bulk email marketing services in Mumbai with social media initiatives.
Make an Assessment of the Current Situation
Before the start of the integration process, it is necessary that you assess the existing situation to get to know if there are already any efforts to integrate social media with email, what goals of social media engagement can be met through email, advantages, and disadvantages of email and social media, etc.
Synchronize Your Calendars
For your email and social media to have the maximum effect on the customer, the calendars need to be coordinated; otherwise, the same communication may be duplicated. If there are two teams working on this, sharing of resources and insights could prove to be extremely valuable. Integrating calendars ensure that all people involved in email marketing, as well as social media, are in the know of all activities, especially when the campaigns start and end, as well as the focus of each campaign. Simply speaking, knowledge of calendars helps everyone to coordinate and prevent conflict internally, and confusion at the customer’s end.
Promote Email Subscription through Social Media
Not only can you promote your social media initiatives through your email campaigns but also you can encourage your social media followers to subscribe to the email newsletters. A very useful way of doing this is to use Twitter Cards that make email signups possible without the subscriber having to leave the Twitter platform. You can also use your Facebook page to actively seek out new email subscribers; adding a subscription form requires only a simple setup process.
Upload Subscriber Lists to Social Media Platforms
Integration of email and social media works the best when the subscriber lists are uploaded to the respective social media accounts. Now you can use these lists to follow the subscribers on the various social media, and specifically, target social media campaigns to those subscribers who have already evinced interest in your brands. You should definitely try and explore the possibilities with Custom Audience Feature that Facebook has to boost the success of your reach.
Conclusion
Gone are the days when you could think of operating independently your social media and email marketing campaigns. Not only do you lose out on the synergy when you do not integrate the two, but also you could very well be sending out conflicting communication that will confuse customers, and negatively impact your brand credentials.
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via Mike Sears
Author bio: Mike Sears is an online communication strategist focusing on the requirements of small businesses. He has had more than a decade of experience in a number of digital marketing companies, including Gingerdomain.com