I recently blogged on adding social media to your website and this time am going to look at how to add it to your email.
Social media is a great complement to your email marketing activities as it gives you more opportunities for sharing information and engaging your readers. Integrating the two will strengthen your efforts in both.
So how do you go about it?
Add “Follow me” links to your email In the same way that you can add “follow me” links to your website, you can add these to your email
newsletters. You can do this via a call-out box in the sidebar or header that contains links that readers can click on to follow you on Twitter, like you on Facebook, subscribe to your YouTube channel, etc.
This demonstrates to readers that you have a social media presence and makes it really easy for them to engage with you on the various platforms.
You should also add these links to your everyday email signature along with your other contact details.
Allow your newsletters to be shared through social media
Integrating social media share buttons in your email newsletters can significantly increase reader interaction and boost traffic from social networking sites. It makes sense to take advantage of this and
add share buttons to your newsletters to expand your readership beyond your subscribers, especially as it won’t cost you anything.
You can use an email marketing system with a feature to automatically include the necessary code. It may be worth testing the newsletter template with a small focus group before you roll it out to all your subscribers. Don’t forget to track how often your articles are shared and how many people read the shared articles.
Link out to your blog posts, videos and presentations Use your email newsletters to promote your other content, such as blog posts and videos. Your newsletter can become a summary of articles, each of which has a heading, an engaging description, and a link to view the full content on your blog or website. This makes it easier for readers to skim your newsletter for the content that interests them and also directs traffic towards your blog and website.
The same can be done with new videos, presentations or other social media content. When you integrate your social media with your email marketing it becomes even more important to keep your branding consistent, so that readers don’t feel as if they’ve been directed somewhere completely different. If your website, email newsletter and social media accounts all have the same look and feel you’ll be able to easily cross-promote across all the different platforms and engage with users in a variety of ways.