I talk to a lot of companies about social media, and the one question that seems to come up time and time again is, “how can we grow our social media following?”
Sure, the platform of choice (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, etc) differs from client to client, and the path to positive ROI varies wildly (direct e-commerce sales, lead generation, brick-and-mortar retail sales, consumer packaged goods demand generation, etc). Still, there’s one particular technique that appears to elude the vast majority of marketers that are attempting to tread the social media waters.
No, I’m not referring to buying Facebook ads.
No, I’m not talking about link baiting or viral campaigns.
No, I’m not referring to building mobile apps.
What I am referring to is email.
Yeah, you remember that channel? It’s arguably the oldest online marketing channel and according to recent studies, it’s the most ROI-friendly one as well. What you probably don’t realize, however, is that email is the original “social network” (and still the network of choice for most older, non-techie folks to share thoughts, links, etc).
More importantly, as far as social media traction is concerned, a well-orchestrated email marketing campaign can become a tipping point of sorts, especially for larger organizations that have hundreds of thousands if not millions of email records in their database.
Think about it. If your email database is well-groomed (e.g. not filled with inactives, hard bounces, etc) it represents a group of people that already trust your brand and in most cases have already done business with it in the past. Therefore, including social calls to action (“follow us on Twitter”, “check out our blog”, “download our mobile app”, etc) can generate exponential increases in followers, blog comments, downloads, etc.
And if your email marketing program is really sophisticated (e.g. advanced segmentation capabilities) you can actually start to gather info on the social tendencies of your email recipients. So for example, you can ask them about their preferences (do they use Twitter or do they prefer Facebook? Do they have a smartphone, and if so, which one?) and then use that info to make sure that your emails are as relevant and targeted as possible (e.g. only send the iPhone calls to action to people that are known to use iPhones). After all, isn’t targeted and relevant email messaging the holy grail of email marketing?
Moreover, leveraging email to cultivate your social following can have a tremendous impact on your overall connection with consumers. For example, there are some consumers that will rarely open your promotional emails, but if you can transition them over to their social network of choice they are much likely to catch wind of your promotional messages, and that can translate into big-time revenue.
I’ve even been involved with some very sophisticated email campaigns that were geared towards identifying potential link-building sources (e.g. customers that have websites worth getting a link from) which had a tremendous impact on SEO efforts.
But I digress.
My main point is that if you’re looking to make inroads on the social landscape and you haven’t thought through the myriad of ways that your email messaging can help this process, it’s time to do so immediately.
And if email marketing isn’t a part of your marketing mix to being with, well, then you’ve got some bigger fish to fry.
As always, if you have questions on any of this stuff, feel free to leave them in the comments section or contact me directly using my contact form.
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I like your style Hugo. Sometimes the best ideas are the ones staring us right in the face. I think the “older” generation trust email a little more so seeing a “follow us” sign on an email may get a better CTR than other, newer places. I like your link building idea too, might put that to use and see how it works out.
Thanks for the comment and insights, Gareth! I definitely think that marketers sometimes fail to see the solutions that are sitting right under their noses. That or they don’t want to mess with the status quo (in this case a conventional email campaign methodology) even though it could have a seriously positive impact on social media efforts.
Greetings, Thanks for the insight on ROI and blogging. Im really not in to the business arena but if I was I would recommend this blog. Do you and all should be well.
Thanks for the kind words, Michael!
I often hear people talking about the difference between email marketing and social media, but your article tells that they can complement each other. Now business marketers are paying more attention to email marketing for its convenience, low-cost and far reaching targets, and there are many email marketing services. For example, if you want to promote new products, you can use Comm100 Newsletter. It can collect and manage the contact list, send free emails to targeted members and track the status of the sent emails. However, there is no doubt that it will be better to adopt email marketing and social media together.
Thanks for the comment and the affirmation, Gloria!