How to Integrate Email Marketing with Social Media?

With the advent of social media, it might be easy to think that email marketing has become outdated or even redundant but statistics gleaned from a 2011 StrongMail survey suggests otherwise.

In fact, according to their data, over 68% of business leaders affirmed that they would be looking to integrate social media into their email marketing strategies and not the other way around.

In addition, the respondents also indicated that they would be increasing investment in this area. This directly counteracts Mark Zuckerberg’s claim that email marketing would be replaced by integrated social media messaging services.

Is Social Media Time Proof?

Despite the astronomical rise of social media, email still tends to be the preferred method of communication between professionals and in a B2B environment.

To think about this preference in a more personal light, one needs only to think about how many times we check our email each week, or even each day. The majority of office based professionals will have their inbox close at hand, constantly, throughout the day.

The use of social media networks, on the other hand, is still mostly discouraged in a professional environment.

This does, however, clearly demonstrate the difference between what is considered appropriate, or not, with regards to different kinds of communication. Despite email being the communication method of choice for office based professionals in a workplace environment, the popularity of social media suggests that, outside this environment, social networking is the preferred option.

Integration to Accumulate

It seems that, in order for a business to maximize its communicative reach, best practice must be to implement an integration of social media and email marketing. Indeed, social media and email have a lot to offer one another, and they share many similar features. Both are the type of direct response which is used to relay information and encourage interaction, and both work best when they are targeted according to relevancy.

Both social media and email also have shortcomings, which may be negated by the other. For example, social media messages have a short shelf life, but email can be used to remind customers about a social media message, after the event.

Integrate Your Social Media and Email Marketing

There are many ways in which you could integrate your social media and email marketing efforts, including:

• Advertising and promoting email sign up across your social media accounts.
• Including social media one-click buttons in your emails.
• Providing an incentive for users to sign up for your emails, such as giveaways and promotions.

All of these methods have proven to be effective ways of integrating social media and email marketing; and, as has been the case with social media and email marketing themselves, they work best when implemented together as part of a comprehensive digital marketing strategy.

Read more at http://www.bloggingtips.com/2014/06/10/integrate-email-marketing-social-media/#0B94drbosQUyWxB0.99