5 Steps to Optimize Your Email For Social Media

Written by Jeff Bullas - View Comments

The popularity of  social media has not reduced the need to to have an email marketing plan as part of your Internet marketing strategy, but there does need to be a reassessment of how you  integrate and optimize the strengths of each of these 2 internet mediums as part of  your marketing planning.   It’s no secret that email marketing is an effective and inexpensive lead generation channel. But while email is effective, it is limited by the size of your email list. This may sound obvious and unexceptional, but social media does not experience the same limitation.

Whereas with email, your reach is equal to your list size, with social media, your reach is equal to your followers, fans, subscribers plus all of their connections, which gives your campaigns more leverage through people consuming and sharing content.

If an update is placed in a Facebook page, all your friends see that update and comment on it and then share it with their friends. If you post a blog post on Twitter then your followers retweet it ( send it onto their followers as a broadcast) this multiplies and leverages  your content in a way that a standard email cannot achieve as it is only seen by 1 person.

In essence, social media gives leverage to your content to expand your reach beyond your existing database. Now, how can you leverage social media from your email marketing?

What are the 5 Steps that Hubspot says need to be taken to optimize your email for Social Media.

Step 1: Figure out which social media sites your customers and potential customers use.Whether you believe it or not, your customers are online talking about you and your industry. Figure out which sites they use the most. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are great places to start for most businesses.

Step 2: Set up profiles on each of these websites. It’s free and just requires your time. And, it’s best to reserve your company name on all these sites immediately , before someone else takes them.

Step 3: Add links in your emails to follow or subscribe to your social media profiles. The people already subscribing to your emails are great candidates for following you in social media, you just need to let them know that you’re there. Social media also gets a leg up on email in that an email address may not stick with someone as they move from one job to another, but social media profiles and subscriptions will.

Step 4: Add links in your emails to post your content to these social media sites. Make it easy for your recipients to share the content with their networks on these social media sites.

Step 5: Integrate social media at all stages of the communication. Follow the user from the email to the landing page and conversion.

3 Typical Results when Integrating and Optimizing Social Media with Email Campaigns

1. An increase the number of mentions in social media
2. The number of subscribers to our social media profiles will rise and
3. A jump in the amount of traffic and leads from social media sites (for this lead generation type of content) due to that buzz on these sites.

So don’t ditch the email marketing, keep fine tuning and tweaking your marketing to utilize the latest web technologies to leverage your marketing strategies.