How to: Connect Email Marketing and Social Media


Nowadays communication is about being at the fingertips of your consumers. Consumers want to find how they can reach you at the click of a mouse button. Whether it’s via email communication, social media, and/or both. Your place of business should make it as easy as possible for your consumers, so why not connect both together? Combine your mechanism for direct response with your organic communities. Therefore consumers can find, communicate, and engage with you how and when they want to. Thus, you’re not “pushing” yourself on them, you’re “pulling” them in. Awesome.

In addition, some people think that email is old school, while social networking is the “new black.” Truth is, you can leverage both in order to effectively manage your brand and increase engagement and ROI in the long run. Here are some great ways to get started…

1. Make your email more social: When you email your blog and/or newsletter subscribers, make sure your email message includes social sharing options. Leverage your email subscriber’s social networks. For example, if your email subscriber list is 10,000, each of those people may have 100 or so followers and 600 or so Facebook friends and another couple hundred LinkedIn connections, and so on. Therefore, your message’s potential social reach could be millions because of the connections your subscribers have. In short, social sharing buttons in your emails is a huge opportunity! Two tools to help you get started:

A. Constant Contact: A great email marketing service that allows you to include a share bar in your newsletter. Therefore, your subscribers (current and potential) can share what they’ve read in your email on their portals such as Facebook,Twitter, and/or LinkedIn. Word of mouth marketing about your service/product? Yes, please. You can try this service for Free up to 60 days and then subscribe for as low as $15/month with other options included.
B. Mail Chimp: Another great email marketing service which allows you to insert your social site icons in your newsletter/email/etc. Therefore subscribers can instantly click and go to your social platforms and engage in real-time and share with others too. Valuable and key to building relationships with your target market. Mail Chimp is free for up to 2000 subscribers and a send limit of 12,000 but you can have unlimited depending on the pricing plan you prefer.

2. Add sign-up options to your social sites: In order to reach out to more of your target market via email,  make sure your social sites such as Facebook, have a link to subscribe to your blog and/or receive a newsletter via email. Make sure this option is easy to find, and easily seen when new potential consumers visit your social site. In addition, if you have a blog and a newsletter, add a “sign up for our email newsletter” on your blog’s sidebar. Great use of ” social real estate”. TIP: Keep your sign up fields short and sweet. That way the target consumer will be more likely to take the 2 seconds to enter their email. Afterwards follow up with your sensational email marketing campaign which promotes your product/service. In addition, this allows your consumer to choose between receiving information via your Facebook page, their  inbox, or however your target market decides they would prefer to learn and keep up to date on what’s going on with your company. This prevents your company from pushing one mode of communication, and instead allowing the consumer to choose what they prefer. Pull them in!

3. Two tools that will rock your socks off:

A. AWeber: Allows you to instantly send a link to your Facebook page and Twitter account and share your newsletter with your followers and fans. That way new and potential target market consumers have a chance to subscribe and/or keep up with your “happenings” via the channel they prefer. First month sign up is for $1.00(normally $19.00/month for up to 500 subscribers).

B. Rapleaf: Takes a unique approach where they assist marketers in understanding “the social connectivity and influence of existing members in their online databases.” Each member has value and can spread the word positively or negatively. Staying on top of the influencers is key and Rapleaf can assist by customizing emails to each member of your audience. Personalized emails? Great way to engage on a higher level. Try out for free here.

Want more social contact management tools? Rapportive, Hoverme, and Gist help to connect the contacts you have from your email and find them on their social networks. Great tools and ways to engage and build relationships and utilize both email and social marketing together. Utilize this “social inbox” because every social media user has an email address for each of their social mdia platforms. In short, “email is the glue that ties social media together” and your company would be wise to make the two work together. To get started, feel free to check out my Toolkit for your convenience…

Note: this post was originally written for oneforty, which was acquired by Hubspot. 

 

 

How to Connect with your Current Customer on Social Media

NOTE : I started freelance blogging recently for oneforty and this was originally a post I did for their blog. This was my first for oneforty so please check it out here or on their blog and please feel free to share comments! :)

Whether you are a B2B or a B2C, connecting with your current customer is crucial. Those current customers are needed for consistent business and through word of mouth may lead to future customers as well. One loyal consumer who boasts about a company’s customer service reputation, can lead to their friends — whether on Facebook, Twitter, or in person — becoming aware of your company and possibly converting to customers as well (for more details on converting people to customers see: The Zen of Social Media Marketing by Shama Kabani).

So how do you connect with these current customers on the social platforms on which they reside, play, comment, tweet, and post? I created this Toolkit to guide your efforts.

Here’s the run-down:

Rapleaf: Want to know the most relevant criteria about your consumer? Rapleaf does this by providing your business with the Who (demographics, location), What (interests, lifestyles, brands they love), Where (online platforms), With Whom (friends), and Weight (their online influence). A tool to help your business improve its customer outreach accurately, easily and in real-time! As quoted by Stephanie Olsen from CNET: “Rapleaf is among a new generation of people search engines that take advantage of the troves of public data on the Net–much of which consumers happily post for public perusal on social-networking sites and personal blogs. The search engines trace a person’s digital tracks across these social networks, blogs, photo collections, news and e-commerce sites, to create a composite profile. Unlike Google, which might link to the same material over pages of search results or after trying different combinations of keywords, these sites attempt to “normalize” personal data so that it’s easily digested by the searcher on one page.”

Flowtown: Although under-going renovations, currently, Flowtown has received much praise for its “goldmine” of consumer information they are able to provide to business owners. Have emails of your current customers? Flowtown takes those emails and helps your business engage with each consumer. As in real life, engagement online is about the personal touch, and building each relationship as you would in real life, is key. Kelly Robertson from 6S Marketing raves on how Flowtown gave her the personal insight needed to reach out to specific users: “By targeting specific users with relevant content to one of the social networks we knew our readers were on, we obtained our highest ever open rate (67.1%) and click rate (31.5%). Both of which, were well over the industry averages (17.9% and 4.1% respectively).” Awesome!

NetProspex: Claim to be the key tool for B2Bs that want to communicate on a more personal level with their customers. This tool gives companies the ability to find the social profiles of their consumers and then leverage that information for their sales team to find the influencers among those customers. In addition, NetProspex lets companies buy or trade contacts to earn credits to find what the company needs from a vast user-contributed directory. According to KillerStartUps.com, “Netpropex would appear to have come up with a dynamic and workable model that should ensure that its database continues to grow and improve over time.”

Klout: This app has 750 partners utilizing the data it is able to retrieve. Want to know the “reach” a customer has in their twitter network?  Klout is the go-to app to determine how valuable each customer is and how they can impact your brand with what they say, tweet, etc. Note: an initial score is given when you go to the site, but an actual score is emailed later after you sign up and further calculations have been done. Thus, this is a great tool that helps companies identify their most influential customers in the social space in order to engage effectively.

Zuberance: A “word of mouth marketing platform” that allows you to find the perfect brand advocates for your company. Then you are able to utilize those advocates as brand ambassadors and hopefully to the benefit of your company and brand. Although there have been some reviewers who do not believe in Zuberance, others seem more objective and give consumers/brands the chance to judge for themselves.

Tweetdeck: Want a tool to stay in great touch with your consumers? Tweetdeck allows you to connect with consumers on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other platforms via one simple application. Tweetdeck also lets you organize your consumers in a simplistic way in order to reach out to people in a consistent, relevant, and easy-to-use format. Worried about missing a chance to be connected? You can access this on your desktop, browser, smartphone, and iPad! Engage away!

Hootsuite: A great social media dashboard for multiple accounts, which allows you to engage, monitor, and track the effectiveness of messages. In addition it has WordPress integration, ability to schedule tweets, and manage followers with ease. Shoutmeloud calls it the “ultimate twitter web client.” A great tool, which allows companies to reach their customers from anywhere such as via smartphone or iPad, which is important for a small business owner who is constantly on “the-go” as well as those who travel often.

How do you know which app is best to utilize? Watch a demo. Try it out. Experience it for yourself and tell us what you think. Like it? Love it? Hate it? Share!