Now that even the most ardent social media advocate will admit that Facebook and the like won’t be killing off email anytime soon, marketers are focusing on how best to leverage social media with email to increase audience reach, customer engagement and retention, and of course, revenue. At Epsilon’s Email Institute Leadership Forum in New York on Sept. 14, Shannon Aronson, senior director, strategic and analytical consulting group at Epsilon, offered several suggestions:
· Include hot topics and catchy quotes from your social media outlets within your emails. We’re already seeing more marketers include customer ratings and reviews within their promotional emails. If there’s a thread on your Facebook wall about a new product that’s been reaping a great deal of response, refer to it in your email and include a link to the page. Or you could ask your Twitter followers to sum up your brand in 140 characters or fewer and then include your favorite tweets within your email message.
· Offer email subscribers coupons and discounts in exchange for following you on Facebook or other social media. As Aronson notes, most people click the “like” button of a brand’s Facebook page primarily to receive special offers. Acknowledge this from the get-go and use it to grow your fan base and encourage engagement. She does advise against using a sweepstakes giveaway to bribe people to become followers, however, as these will attract a significant percentage of people who have no interest in actually buying your products or services.
· That said, contests do have their place. A contest in which you reward customers for engaging—submitting to your Facebook page a photo of themselves using one of your products, for instance—can create buzz and tie together multiple channels, including email.
· Consider running contests on a regular cadence. Aronson suggests something along the lines of “Twitter Tuesdays, “ in which every Tuesday at the same time you run some sort of quiz or contest. Penguin Books in the UK, for example, used to run contests on Fridays in which it would tweet the opening words of a book, and the follower who tweeted the correct answer would win a book. Again, this sort of regularly scheduled contest can easily be promoted to your email subscribers, encouraging them to follow your Twitter feed.
· Conduct polls via your social media, then use the data to assist in email segmentation.
· Post links to your social media outlets on your email unsubcribe pages. You might think this a ridiculous suggestion: After all, if they were happy to engage with your brand, these consumers wouldn’t be unsubscribing in the first place. But it may be the medium and not your brand that these unsubscribers are unhappy with. Acknowledging that with copy along the lines of “We understand that you no longer wish to receive emails from us. But perhaps you’d like to continue to stay in touch through Facebook instead” could maintain the customer engagement.
· Place links to your social media at the top of your marketing emails, rather than burying them at the bottom. And consider including them in your transactional emails as well.
