Often things just seem to work better in pairs, and it’s the same when it comes to looking at the yin & yang of digital marketing.
Even though social media shouldn’t be seen as a replacement for more senior online advertising strategies, nobody can disregard such a massive audience and its vast spending power. Reach a wider audience - encourage readers to share email newsletters socially.
For starters, you can boost interest in your campaigns by posting email newsletter headlines to your social networking page prior to sending out a new mailer. You can also directly encourage email sign-ups by feeding readers interesting snippets of newsletter content, providing a link to your subscription page and promoting more follow-throughs in general to your site. Social media can act as a great complementary channel to standard online marketing services and allows companies to cast a wider net in the drive to transition social followers to their email marketing opt-in subscriber list.
Email and social are symbiotic. All people who make use of social networking websites rely on email to monitor updates, and email followers are drawn to Web 2.0 by its ease of sharing and viral facilities.
Additionally one can use social share to promote the spread of email newsletters to networks outside of your immediate reach by, for example, running competitions wherein fans could qualify for winning prizes by recommending your email newsletters to their connections.
A word of caution however. Ensure that any quizzes which you operate are not in violation of promotions guidelines such as those stipulated by Facebook . There is a good chance that if you solicit competition-related feedback directly to your wall, you will be contravening these rules. Instead, the regulations demand that competitions should be run through a Facebook application which will show up on a separate tab on the fan page and which is subject to an approval review process.
So while it is clear that social media barons are working to bring more governance to the platform’s promotional mojo, with the use of skillful email and social integration techniques you can still draw measurable benefits without risking having your campaigns backfire on you.
GraphicMail offers easy, instant syndication of email newsletters to your social networks, with LIKE buttons in email headers as well as social widgets. These social share features enable you to publish your newsletter to your Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, LinkedIn, MySpace and Yahoo profiles. It's simple to expand your marketing efforts by posting newsletter links and summaries and you don't even have to log into your account to create posts - social share will update your associated social networking profiles automatically.
It's a marriage of titans - Pairing email newsletters with social sharing will absolutely empower your email marketing efforts.
