Aug
31
Written by:
Whereoware Staff
Wednesday, August 31, 2011 12:37 PM
More and more we are seeing social media and email marketing converge. It makes sense. Both channels can work together to extend your reach, create meaningful conversation with customers and increase conversions.
The three ways
- Include your social media channels in the header of your email. Many email platforms have made this super simple with plugins. Even if your email platform doesn’t have a plugin, it is easy to find free social media icons to add to your email header (hint: just Google free social media icons). Once you add them to your header, don’t forget to link them to your social media platforms.
Take it a step farther by including social sharing buttons in your email. Don’t worry, we haven’t gone crazy and started repeating ourselves. These buttons are different from what is described above. They allow users to post a link to your email or specific content in your email to their social networks. Again many platforms have a plugin you can use for this.
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- Create social-media-only offers and promote them through email. You can have fun with it and make it a secret sale where customers only discover the deal if they ‘like’ your Facebook page. Right about now you’re probably thinking “cool idea, but how do I hide the sale from people who do not ‘like’ me yet?” Well, it takes a bit of work, but there are many free Facebook apps that allow you to build out custom pages for Facebook. Many of these apps allow you to display different content for people who ‘like’ you vs. those that don’t. You may want to check out these apps: Static HTML: iframe tabs (requires some html knowledge) oriFrames for pages by Wildfire (this one allows you to just upload an image).
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- Add an email signup to your Facebook page. With a little html knowledge you can place an email signup form on your custom Facebook page. You will need access to a couple of things. First, you will need an email signup form that is associated with your email platform. Many of the most popular email platforms have it readily available and make it easy to copy and paste some code that is associated with the form. Then, you will need to install one of the apps that are described above. Once you have it installed, you will need to paste the code you copied from your email platform into the app.
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“Socialize” your email slowly if you like. Tip 1 is the easiest to get started with. Stop looking at social and email as completely separate channels. When they play nicely with each other, you can reap the benefits.