Better joint use of your email and social channels

Absrtact: Using a fixed database that captures and uses personally identifiable information, e-mail is a very good performance as a licensed communication channel. Social channels use built-in tools and features to motivate and accelerate user sharing behavior.

Using a fixed database that captures and uses personally identifiable information, e-mail is a good performance as a licensed communication channel. The social channel is to use built-in tools and functions to motivate and accelerate the user's shared behavior. If marketers can connect the two strategies together, you will have a strong marketing mix that can provide a powerful audience with highly relevant, personal information, and a tool to share their passion for your news and services.

To achieve the best results with both strategies, you need to make both strategies work in a truly coordinated way. e-mail marketing campaigns should plan, optimize, and track standard e-mail marketing metrics, as well as new metrics that reflect your incentives to share, enjoy, and other indicators of participation. Similarly, your social marketing campaigns should be planned and implemented based on the results of e-mail marketing. Ideally, all activity effects should be viewed and reported on a common platform so you can document and analyze the cross channel impact of all marketing activities.

This cross channel resource integration focuses on data, and more specifically, on your mail database. However, your email database is not just a repository of all your information, but a right-hand one-allowing you to take advantage of the social information and observed behavior you collect.

Here are some ways to better combine your email and social channels:

I. Giving

Give your social fans a compelling reason to join your buddy list, such as previews, or unique content, tools, coupons, or discounts.

Provide your audience with content clips or thumbnails that you can use in a social environment. This is especially good because the content can be shared among friends. Maybe it will bring you new user groups.

Provide users with tools that allow them to easily add to your list. Facebook apps with simple tables are easy to build. Do not give users a bunch of information to fill out, as much as possible to keep simple. Use the Facebook Permissions during cleanup or competition, which allows you to get e-mail and other personal information, such as birth dates, without having to fill out a form with a customer.

II. Testing

Do a lot of testing to get the content, the way, or the information you want to succeed, so that they can be previewed in one channel and rolled out in other channels. For example, add popular content to your blog, then remind Subscribers to view them, and invite them to participate in the discussion. In so doing, the ultimate goal is to get your users to visit each of your channels to track their responses.

Facebook ads are an efficient way to test images and information, both cheap and fast. From some of the best options for Facebook's ad copy, they have some common features in the email subject line: Short and to the point, focused on calling the user to take action or the reasons or benefits of doing it.

Iii. frequency

Strategically using social channels to release news and reminders can help to appear regularly in front of the audience without increasing the risk of e-mail list fatigue. Again, this approach is free, or almost free. This message is more meaningful if the information is short and is not appropriate for sending e-mail messages.

Iv. Performance

By using social media channels, increase the channels for external communication and remind your community about new e-mail messages through news, commercials, or promotional events. You can use this to remind your community of upcoming big events: "Please check your email and check out our special offers for subscribers."

Instead, use e-mail to preview some upcoming social events, encouraging list members to be fans and followers, if they are not.

V. User Selection

If you use a social platform to get new e-mail subscribers, you'll need to eliminate those who focus only on bonuses and are less relevant to the target audience. Then provide a qualifying promotion to help you determine the real or potential value of these new users.

Make sure that users have an email preference Center review so they can specify the sending frequency, format, etc. ... to establish an active email communication relationship.

Vi. efficiency

Use your email content-because creating good content can be time-consuming and costly, and you need to tap into its value as much as possible. Find blogs that can cover targeted users, and then be careful to get in touch with them and provide them with relevant content.

Add share buttons to all your Web sites and blog content so that your users can easily use this technology to share your content.

The social community has some unique characteristics that you need to respect and apply to your cross channel database and marketing plan. In the community area, managing and sharing content is a major activity, not only to give them full justification and roadmap to join your email list, but also to provide the right tools to support these users.

In the second part I will explore some specific marketing recommendations for social networking sites in the two models for exploring the use of email-social syndication.