Social Media and Email Marketing: A Match Made in Heaven?

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Key takeaways

• Email and social are complementary. Combine both to broaden reach and drive visitors to your site.
• Email marketing is a direct, traditional channel: build a list, send newsletters, offers and email‑only promotions to drive clicks and signups.
• Social media emphasizes conversation and visibility; it spreads the same messages via shares and expands audience reach.
• Add social share buttons (retweet, like, favourite) inside emails to let subscribers expose your content to new prospects.
• There’s no clear ROI winner. Experts disagree, so using both channels avoids cutting off opportunities.
• Effective emails use snappy text and sharp visuals to maximize clicks; exclusive email perks help grow the mailing list.

Introduction

It’s 2014, and the Internet has never been more alive with people connecting across the globe on countless platforms. While this might not be awe-inspiring to some, if you’re a business looking to connect with customers, this is the golden age of interactive marketing and building virtual connections. Standing astride many campaigns and projections are connecting with customers via social media and email marketing initiatives. On the surface, these two practices might not seem to have much room for overlap. However, with a deeper look from both sides of the process, you might be surprised at just how much synergy exists between social media and email marketing, leading you to revamp how you interact with your customers entirely.

The Goal of Marketing via Emails

To start, email marketing approaches the process of connecting with consumers in a more traditional manner. By building a database of potentially interested individuals, you can ship out newsletters, offers and informational emails that help redirect customers back to your website and through the doors of your physical storefront. In some cases, having exclusive promotions or other perks listed in an email-only format, helps promote your mailing and the importance of signing up. Once you’ve got your email list up and running, these messages require optimization that is akin to the refinement that happens from a content marketing standpoint. By having high quality emails that include snappy text and sharp visuals, you can maximize your chances of wowing a viewer and getting a click back to your site and join a growing trend of email marketing effectiveness that has reached unprecedented levels in recent months.

Reaching Out via Social Media

Similarly, social media is all about showing off your brand in the right way, even if the platform is fundamentally different. With this approach, you can share the same messages and promotions via Twitter, Facebook and Google+ that you would with an email marketing initiative. The difference is that your content usually focuses on building a conversation and expanding your organization’s virtual reach via visibility. To put it simply, the more people talk about your content on any of these sites, the more other people take notice and give your products attention. From this perspective, the goal of getting viewers in your web store remains the same, but the path they take to get there is slightly different.

Is There a Connection?

Considering that joining virtually any social media website requires a working email address, you can safely assume that your target audience overlaps in at least some fashion on both of those platforms. However, the question of whether or not you can draw connections between the two styles of marketing still needs to be answered. When combined properly, there is room for a strong connection between social media and your email marketing campaign. For instance, building in retweet, like and favorite options on your emails gives viewers a chance to freely share with others who may not be on your mailing list. Basically, every time someone clicks one of these little buttons, you get access to a new list of potential customers that would otherwise have never had a chance to learn about your promotional content. For anyone who wants to get the most out of their email marketing budget, it’s hard to say no to free exposure via a social media referral.

Is One Better Than the Other?

While you can clearly start to connect the dots and build a connection between the two styles, you might be wondering why smart marketers don’t just go with the method that has a better return on investment or other performance metric. While this is pretty strong thinking, the reality is that there is no clear winner when you start to draw comparisons. On one hand, eMarketer released a study showing that 2014 was the year for social media. In direct contrast is a report from the equally credible Forbes that asserts the supremacy of email marketing over social media. With experts toeing both sides of the battle lines, there is no best choice.

Maximizing Your Return with a Smart Marketing Campaign

Instead of picking only one strategy and cutting yourself out of potential opportunities to increase visibility and sales, a great marketing campaign builds off both the social aspect of reaching out to customers and the power of an optimized email initiative to get the best of both worlds. By having social media accounts that spread the same content and messages as your emails, you can reach out to the subscribers who might not relate to a promotional email or would otherwise let it go unnoticed in a cluttered inbox. Additionally, having the share features listed above in your emails gives you extra reach that, when used effectively, will have any professional marketer jumping with joy over the free exposure to friends and family of those on your mailing list. Now that you are up to speed on the bond between email marketing and social media you can rest assured that you have all of the knowledge you need to make a smart choice when you get ready to fire up your next online advertising campaign. By harnessing the reach of social media and the effectiveness of optimized emails, you’ll never be left wondering if you could have done more to enhance your brand awareness in the digital marketplace.

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