Many small businesses don’t realize the importance of integrating their social media and email campaigns. But if you’re interested in growing your subscriber base, extending the reach of your email campaigns, and identifying your brand ambassadors, then this is the list for you!
1. Include social follow buttons in your email
Most email services, including MailJet, make it easy for you to incorporate your social media follow buttons in each of your email campaigns. Link these buttons to your social media accounts, include them in your email campaign, and then invite your subscribers to connect with you on social media.
Doing this gives you more platforms on which to engage with your customers, increasing the reach of your message and your social media engagement.
And please don’t hide your follow links at the bottom using small, tasteful, hard-to-see buttons. Place them front and center, making your invitation obvious.
2. Include share buttons in your email
Social share buttons are another thing that most email services make it easy for you to include in your email.
Share buttons aren’t the same as your follow buttons. Share buttons, placed at the top or bottom of each article (or in the body of the email if your email has only one topic), will encourage your readers to share your email to their social followers. And in case the buttons alone aren’t enough incentive, be sure and invite your readers to share.
3. Publish a link to your email campaign on your blog and social media platforms
Write a blog post that talks about your email campaign, but don’t give your blog readers all the information! Include a link to your email campaign for them to read it in its entirety.
Your blog post doesn’t have to be lengthy. A blog post of 300 words is long enough to be noticed by search engines. This is a good place, by the way, to include an email subscription form.
Then tweet about it! On Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and your other social networks, build up the information included in your email campaign with a link to the campaign.
4. Have a retweet tag in your email
Include a #hashtag in each email campaign that relates to that specific campaign, and encourage your readers to talk about your campaign on Twitter using your chosen hashtag. This will enable you to track mentions of your business on Twitter.
5. Create an exclusive social group for your email subscribers
A private group on Facebook for your subscribers can be a valuable resource for both you and them. It provides a place for you to learn to know your subscribers’ needs, enabling you to serve them better. A private group can also create the mystique of an exclusive club for your subscribers.
Because of this desirable mystique, it will be helpful to tell potential subscribers that being added to your private group is a benefit they’ll receive as a result of signing up for your email list. They may even encourage their friends to sign up so they’ll be added to the private group, too.
6. Use a professional email address
The results you get from integrating your social media into your email will be even more powerful if you use a professional email address.
Using a professional email address will give your business credibility, make you look more professional and stable, and increase confidence in you and your product or service. It will also make your business more memorable to your customers and potential customers.
If you’re using a free email service like Yahoo or Gmail for your business, you are doing yourself a disservice. Statistics show that customers and potential customers are nine times more likely to choose a business with a professional email address. So if you don’t already have a professional domain name for your business, now is the time to choose one.
A major goal in choosing your domain name should be for your organization to rank higher in online searches for the terms and keywords that are used in your business. You can use this handy tool provided by Shopify to help you make a choice. Just type in keywords related to your business and click “Generate Names”. You can even put in more than one keyword at once! Suggested available domain names that contain your keyword(s) will come up.
So now that you know that integrating your social media into your email campaigns is so important and so easy, now is the time to get started. Just get your domain name using Shopify’s fun tool, write your first email campaign, and press send. Then be prepared to be impressed with the reach of your message, the growth of your subscriber base, and your newly-identified brand ambassadors!
