When it comes to building a networked, loyal audience with long-term awareness of your brand, the best strategy is to mix and match between the different marketing channels. For example, sending out emails while also publicizing your content in social media.

Towards the end of 2014 an extensive survey was conducted among marketing executives of some of the largest companies, showing that these two channels were expected to grow extensively during 2015.

Marketing and advertising through social media is expected to grow by approximately 37 percent, while marketing through email is expected to grow by anywhere between 3 and 10 percent. One of the reasons for that is that the many personalization options, which have recently been introduced to the playing field, had changed the game.

Why is This Growth Trend Expected?

The first reason is the high return on investment (positive ROI) that stems from email marketing that counts as a very especially profitable marketing method.

At the same time, email usage has become very popular, with 78% of the population between the ages of 18-44 reporting that they use their smartphone to check their emails.

Meanwhile, there are 1.96 billion active social media accounts, which represent 23% of the world population. Of these 1.96 billion, the average user spends an average of more than 2 hours a day on his social profiles.

These two marketing channels are growing impressively and consistently, which makes  marketing executives realize that they should harness the power of email marketing in order to improve their brand awareness in social media and vice versa.

To our surprise, however, we don’t see a correlation between the number of a company’s mailing list subscriptions and the number of the said company’s followers on the different social media networks.

For example, a recent study shows that out all of the social media followers of a certain company, only 50% are also subscribed to the company’s mailing list.

Similarly, the overlap between the different social media networks of the same company is pretty limited; only 5% of a company’s Facebook followers also follow them on Twitter and 40% of a company’s Twitter followers also follow the Company’s Facebook account.

On the surface, email and social media serve different purposes, but if we take a closer look we understand that these two channels are supposed to be serving the same central purposes: raising the customer’s loyalty, involvement and sense of belonging.

What’s the difference between the social and email channels and how do they help each other?

After having gone over some of the dry data, let’s delve into how marketing executives should be leveraging one channel’s success in order to benefit the other.

While social media marketing is an excellent way to raise ‘brand awareness’ and to grow your audience, email is still the most efficient way to ‘purchase’ your audience’s loyalty.

Your social media followers can be defined better as ‘leasing’ entities than as entities that your brand successfully ‘purchased.’

Nothing portrays this better than the natural, organic decrease of your brand’s exposure on Facebook.

In 2014 Facebook completed the “Free gifts” promotion for marketers in order to reach its user audience, leaving the marketers with a sweet taste for the benefit of their brand exposure.

Your Facebook business page followers are not your ‘possessions,’ – their Facebook’s.  In order to reach them, you need to show Facebook the money!

This fact alone increases your need to ‘purchase’ your social media followers’ email addresses, turning them into your email recipients, thus allowing you to work on their loyalty to your brand directly through email.

How to roll up your sleeves and get to work

As your first step, create a sign-up form using ActiveTrail’s advanced sign-up form builder and embed it into your product page on Facebook. We wrote an article that will help you embed your sign-up form into your Facebook page as smoothly as possible.

This simple step will encourage your Facebook friends and followers to sign up to receive your newsletter.

You can also do this by designing a landing page in ActiveTrail’s advanced landing page system, incorporating a sign up form within it.

In addition, you should advertise a link to the landing page that you designed in the various social media networks, such as Twitter and Instagram,

Take advantage of social media in order to give your audience a taste of your awesome (and exclusive) content that you usually only expose to your email recipients.

You can also share your campaign directly on your social media business pages using the various share buttons in the window that opens when you send your email:

Newsletters are adapted to fit the continuous and intimate process with the customer with the chock full of original content, in comparison to advertisements on Facebook and Twitter, with which you can give a taste of your content in order to tempt and encourage your followers to subscribe to your mailing list.

You can also choose to throw an extra incentive into the mix in order to turn your list of followers into your mailing list. Many companies offer coupons or discounts to first-time customers after they subscribe to their mailing lists.

Mobile, mobile, and again, mobile!

Always remember the data that we mentioned in the beginning of the article, which indicated that smartphone owners mainly use their smartphones for the purpose of checking their email, with 45% of all read emails that were opened on smartphones in the year 2014. These numbers keeps on growing, as ActiveTrail recognizes now that over 50% of emails are opened on mobile phones.

30% of all consumers indicated that they read their emails exclusively on their smartphones, and what’s more, almost 70% indicated that they will go as far as to delete any emails that aren’t adapted to be read on mobile phones.

So we can see that creating emails in a mobile responsive design is very important, and should not be overlooked.

ActiveTrail provides its customers with the world’s most advanced editing system for emails adapted to mobile phones and tablets and it works with the drag and drop method, the simplest of them all.

The design is on you – the adaptation is on us!

Let’s talk terminology…

Facebook and other social media networks are known for being at the top of the ‘sales funnel,’ their main role to attract new leads and customers while increasing your ‘brand awareness’. However, in reality, Facebook is not so effective in attracting new customers. Almost 85% of each Facebook page’s followers are existing customers of the brand, informing us that Facebook is actually more efficient in maintaining existing customers as opposed to attracting new ones.

Although the email marketing channel’s primary role is to escort potential customers down the sales funnel, turning them into paying customers, email marketing can also increase your brand’s audience on social networks, simply by using the techniques listed above.

Inter-channel integration options and research data

The most immediate and successful way to use your mailing list in increasing your brand exposure in the social media networks is to integrate social media buttons into your newsletters.

ActiveTrail’s campaign editor offers the two most important features involved in creating inter-channel connections:

Using the share feature you can offer a benefit or a raffle to those that choose to share your campaign on social media.

Using the ‘find us’ feature you can direct your customer audience to your pages in the social media networks with an extra little incentive, which will encourage them to follow you in this channel.

The inter-channel promotion has shown in many cases an increase of 325% of new Facebook followers on the day that a campaign is sent via email. Of course, the inter-channel marketing works fantastically in the other direction as well – a promotional announcement on social media that is meant to encourage followers to sign up to your mailing list can raise the subscription rate by about 225% relative to the amount of daily subscriptions.

Don’t be shy – add a ‘share’ or ‘find us’ button to every email campaign that you send out. The more available these buttons are to your customers, the higher the chances are that they will actually click on them. Your campaign isn’t the only place where you can embed social media buttons,  you can do it also on your thank you page after a customer subscribes, in the campaign sent to the customer immediately after subscribing to your mailing list, or even in service mailings such as emails containing invoices, emails allowing the customer to reset his password, etc.

To sum things up – Emails and social media go hand in hand

Using your mailing list in order to boost your list of followers in social media (and of course, vice versa) is a strategy in which the profit is entirely yours. However, always remember the main goals of each individual channel and that each channel has its pros and cons in regards to the messages that you wish to convey.

Harnessing the success of one marketing channel for the benefit of the other marketing channel is a great strategy in favor of increased awareness on a short-term and a long-term scale, nurturing your relationship with your social media followers and email recipients, and turning them into loyal paying customers.

And that’s not all the options you have-  Learn How to increase sales with the help of marketing SMS messages.

You can also read more on our blog.