Many business owners treat email marketing and social media marketing as completely separate entities. In truth, they complement each another perfectly. When you use one to support the other, you’ll get synergy. Your marketing results will improve, you’ll get a rise in website visits and, ultimately, a more profitable bottom line.
Find Your Audience
To grow leads and your business you want to find the people who have a strong interest in your products, services and the information you provide. Social media helps you find people who are interested similar products and services and connect with them.
Check out competitors customers and strategy by cruising their social media accounts. Their demographics are probably the same as yours. If their Facebook page or Twitter account is successful check out how and what they’re posting. Can you improve on their strategy? What are they missing that you can add to your social media strategy? Do they have a way for people to subscribe to their newsletters? Social media is a great way to narrow down the demographic of people interested in what you’re selling.
Now that you know who your audience is and where they spend their time, begin collecting email addresses on your own social media account. With the info you collect you’ll be able to connect with them via email and push them to your site with messages that target their specific interests.
Collect Contact Information
Twitter
Send tweets with your free opt-in offer and a link.
Run a Twitter contest and exchange a sweepstakes entry for an email address or a share.
Use Twitter Lead Generation cards in Twitter Ads.
Facebook
Add a tab to your Facebook business page and use your cover image to “sell” your free opt-in offer.
Run a contest on Facebook using a contest app like ShortStack or TabSite. Exchange an contest entry for a email address.
Use Facebook Ads targeting, to narrow down your demographics even further. By using a Facebook ad with a minimum ad spend you can find viewers that are interested in what you do easily.
With social media you can obtain email addresses by geographic location, special interests, pages liked, age, or sex and other demographic info. The people who join your email list will be very interested in what you offer and eager to receive your emails.
Build Targeted Lists
Once you the consumers who take a strong interest in what you provide and are likely to use your services subscribe, you can use email to contact them. Email can have a low response rate. But when you use social media to target consumers who have, with their prior actions, displayed an interest in your goods and services, you should have higher than normal response rates to your email campaigns.
It’s important to build lists that match consumers with information that’s most valuable and relevant to them. The information might have a geographic reference, a product reference, or a specific interest reference.
Say you want to send an email about a bicycling event in the Houston area. You can use your lists to cross-reference consumers who have a strong interest in bicycling, live in the Houston area, and send the email to them. The response rate will be much stronger than if you sent an email to your entire list because you have people who don’t live in the area and have no interest in bicycling on your list. In fact, if you send this very tightly niched event email to your entire list you may run the risk of unsubscribes for lack of interest.
Pinpoint Targeting for Success
With social media, you can pinpoint the consumers you want to target with specific email messages and calls to action. Pinpointing saves time and establishes your business as a resource for the interests of your list members. When your email viewers receive info that’s valuable to them, they’ll pay attention and are far less likely to report your email as SPAM. Better still, you stand a much greater chance of a higher response rate and can build your reputation when the email is shared with others who have similar interests.
Integrated Email Campaigns Are the Most Effective
The marriage of social media and email marketing is vital to getting the most out of your online marketing efforts and boost relevant traffic to your website and business. When you combine the two, you’ll create a synergy. Your marketing results in each will improve while your marketing costs decrease. You’ll see an improvement in your website rank in search engines. When your search engine results improve for your website, more people will find you. Bottom line … lower costs, more traffic, and bigger profits.
How have you used social media to build targeted email lists? Have you noticed a better result when using them together? Please share your methods below.
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