Integrating email and social media

Towards a strategy for integrating email marketing with social media

Value : [rating=4]

Our commentary : The article explains that many email service providers have introduced "share to social" features enabling email marketers to include buttons to share email content through Facebook, Twitter or Linked In. While these can be useful, it's much more important to think through the overall strategy of integration between email and social and how they fit.

Marketing implications : For me, the strategy implications prompted are:

• 1. Prioritisation. You need to prioritise your many social channel choices, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, Blog, Community and Enewsletter to focus on the ones that works best for your audience and marketplace. E.G. Perhaps Email, Twitter and Linked-In for professional B2B marketing. It's not about providing infinite choice in most cases, it's about using the best approaches.
• 2. Value proposition You need to define a clear differentiated value proposition for each channel to offer something appropriate for each set of users and to encourage adoption. For example, promotions through Facebook, Support through Twitter or perhaps if you're large enough you may need sub-channels within each for support.
• 3. Editorial process Define an editorial content sourcing, review and publication process so that the the content and promotions are integrated with offline campaign activities.
• 4. Tools Select the best tools for an efficient publication process, for example use RSS feeds, Twitterfeed and the Facebook, Linked In Twitter applications to share content without manual republishing. But don't forget to add human interaction.
• 5. Interaction Think through how you will facilitate interaction. There is a danger with social channels that they just become a substitute for push email communications. So think how you will ask questions, solve customer problems and share information and promotions from complimentary companies
• 6. Tracking How will you tag your links to work out which content and promotions are popular for sharing. Which tools will you use to monitor sentiment?

The article gives some creative examples of how to integrate email and social:

• Using Twitter as a landing page for instance, including the text of the tweet.
• Linking to product reviews of your products instead of to the products themselves
• Monitoring trends to act swiftly via a topical e-mail.
• Using a subject line that gets shared on Twitter with a strong message and even including the @ Twitter handle of the sender
• Identifying influencers by tracking the people that retweet or bookmark email messages your recipients have retweeted or bookmarked.

Recommended link: Read article: integrating email and social media