MRI Casino Marketing Blog
Become a Social Animal

Social Media and Email Marketing: Marketing Strategies for Synergy, Cross-Promotion and Increased Penetration  

Email is an oft-neglected aspect of social media marketing—and yes, email is considered social media. In fact, email campaigns are the precursor to modern social media marketing and remain extremely relevant. Email marketing campaigns and social media platforms can work together in perfect harmony, each of them boosting the effectiveness of the other.

Promoting Social Media through the Use of Email Blasts

It's often easier to procure email leads than social media leads; email addresses can be filtered, culled and sorted regarding your specific marketing desires. Once emails have been acquired, the next step is sending out email blasts, which encourage social media interaction.

Of course, this does not downplay email's usefulness as a direct conversion tactic. Email has very high conversion rates especially in relation to social media campaigns because email is personalized and targeted in a way that social media usually is not.

Using Email to Strengthen and Consolidate Existing Social Media Contacts

It's important to remember that while not everyone may have a Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram or Pinterest account, almost everyone has email. In fact, email is more popular than cell phones. As the social media market continues to fragment, with giants such as Myspace returning and new startups like Ello, it becomes very difficult for a company to maintain any type of market penetration on an individual site.

Email can be used to consolidate social media contacts by connecting with all clients at once and attempting to draw them into engagement on specific social media pages or even through a blog or other similar territory. Email has significantly greater market penetration than any combination of social media accounts and should be used to augment them for marketing purposes.

Reaching Core Demographics through Social Media and Email

Social media and email can work beautifully in tandem because each individual platform reaches a core demographic. More youthful consumers tend to congregate around Tumblr while older consumers focus on Facebook. A company interested in sending out an email blast could target users of a specific social network that best matches their core demographic.

Encouraging Social Media and Email Sharing and Engagement

It is important to identify ways in which the consumer can interact with a company on both social media platforms and through email. Social media and email have long been used to share content, so companies often encourage users to share content through both of these venues. But that is not all. Below are a few other tactics that companies may use to broaden their scope:

• Contests. There are many companies that hold small giveaways and other contests on social media and request email addresses. Some contests may even directly ask someone to sign up for a newsletter.
• Blogs. Blogs can be used to encourage social sharing and to collect information, especially blogs that require that the user sign up before they can post feedback on content.
• Promotions. Discount codes and other promotions can be funneled through email addresses rather than via social media to obtain email addresses. The reverse is also true: companies can offer promotions to those on their mailing list willing to connect through social media.
• Print. Print media such as brochures, menus, coupons and business cards can all be used to direct consumers towards either emailing or connecting through social media accounts.

Lead acquisition is a critical component of both social media marketing and email marketing and both of them can be used to successfully gather leads for the other.

Creating a Brand Across Marketing Strategies

One of the major reasons clients fail to engage with brands or fail to convert from leads is because the brand is not cohesive or consistent between marketing strategies.

As an example, an email must tie into the company's brand successfully before sending a user from email to social media platform—otherwise the user may click over but not convert because they are given a disjointed and unexpected experience. Company branding on email and social media includes more than just the physical attributes of the brand but also the tone of the communications.

Developing a Comprehensive, All-Inclusive Strategy

Marketers interested in improving and further integrating their email marketing with their social media campaigns will find that the task becomes easier as the engagement level increases. Customer feedback and their interests will provide a path to next steps.

Marketing is a combination of factors rather than individual components. Together, email and social media marketing create a comprehensive campaign that is greater than the sum of individual parts. A modern marketing strategy will use both marketing methods to reinforce a company's brand, increase its marketing scope and improve its user engagement—and all for a fairly low investment of both time and money.