Us marketers know that there are many ways to get in front of our target audience, but social media and email marketing are two channels that definitely work well together. The benefits of using social media and email marketing are that they are low cost, highly personal, trackable and measurable.
The average UK social media user spends 1.5 hours on their profile everyday (Source: Statista), so you have a huge opportunity to target existing and potential email subscribers across various platforms, but knowing what to do and how to do it may take some thought and planning.
To help you get started, here’s a list of things you can do to promote your email marketing campaigns and grow your email lists using social media.
Run sponsored ‘subscribe’ ads
Trying to maintain communication via social media can be difficult – you have limited control over where your posts appear in the news feed of your customers, unless you run sponsored ads. Using each platform to acquire email sign ups reduces the amount on time you need to spend on social media alone.
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn allow you to highly target specific users with sponsored ads that feature a call to action. On both Facebook and Twitter you can include a subscribe button that automatically populates the users details, making it even easier for them to sign up to your emails.
Promote exclusive offers for email subscribers
Advertising exclusive offers that are only available to those on your email subscriber list is a great way of giving users a reason to part with their email address. If the offer is strong enough and you repeat your campaign it should reach a wider audience. You can choose whether you restrict this offer to new customers only, but remember to give your email subscribers a reason to stay subscribed too.
Run email sign-up competitions
If an exclusive offer isn’t right for you then try a pushing a competition or giveaway on social media. Most of you are doing this already, but primarily with the objective of increasing the breadth of followers on social media. Try asking for an email address instead to build your email subscriber list, this will be more valuable to you.
Using social logins on your website
If your website allows customers to register or sign in using their Facebook, Twitter or Google+ account then make sure you ask permission to view their email address, and request an email subscription opt-in as part of this process. This guarantees a better opt-in rate as customers agree or disagree to receiving emails there and then, compared to the traditional opt-in process where they sign up and confirm their subscription via email again.
Sharing your email marketing campaigns
Quite simply, sharing your email marketing campaigns via social media will increase the number people that see it, especially if your social media followers are not yet subscribed. If a user interacts with your post then this will be visible to their friends or followers, which presents an opportunity for them to also interact with the shared content, especially if you’re running a competition for new email subscribers.
Using existing email subscriber data
There are ways to use your existing email subscribers to find new subscribers via social media, and for this to be effective you need to ensure you clean your data regularly. You can upload email addresses from your current list and run a series of sponsored ads to target these specific customers, encouraging them to also follow you on social media. You can then create a separate sponsored ad campaign to target their friends and followers, encouraging them to connect with you via social media and subscribe to your emails.
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