Social media and email marketing

January 9, 2010

Social Media & Email Marketing

Your e-marketing and social media strategies must complement each other.

Ask your email provider if they can offer you sharing services within your email campaigns. This allows recipients to quickly share your campaigns with their cyber friends.

Encourage these cyber friends to then sign up themselves to join your mailing list. This leads to data capture so you are gaining contacts that are interested in your brand and promotions.

Dialogue

Social Media is all about dialogue. Your website is probably a monologue, telling your visitors about who you are and what you do. Your social media efforts need to be so much more than that, you need to listen just as much as you talk. This also applies to email.

You’ve probably received emails from brands where the ‘from’ address is something like do.not.reply@brand.com. That approach is a bit like saying “we want to talk to you but we don’t want you to talk to us…..oh, unless you want to order something, in which case click here”.

It’s easy to see what’s wrong with that approach yet we still see it everyday.

Listen

In social media, as soon as you start to talk people will expect you to listen. Once you start to listen, you might change the way you talk……get it?

Just in case you still haven’t got it 83% of social media users believe that a company should go further than just having a presence on social sites and should also interact with its customers. (Cone, Business is Social Media Study, Sept 2008).

So stop thinking about campaigns and start thinking about conversations.

Author:  Andy Francis, email marketing provider

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