Today’s guest post is from Morgan Witt, senior strategist at Red Door Interactive and member of our SmartBrief on Social Media Advisory Board.
Your e-mail newsletter provides a great opportunity to act as a “connector” between the various consumer touch points that you maintain. By adding social-sharing tools to share content as well as promoting links to connect with your brand on your social network pages within your e-mail newsletters, you empower subscribers to share. It also allows you as a marketer to identify which subscribers are sharing the most. These brand evangelists can then be identified, segmented, and leveraged as an elite group of influencers.
Keep these factors in mind when applying your e-mail + social media integrated strategy:
- Understand what motivates your subscribers to share.
- Deliver dynamic, relevant content.
- Make calls to action clear and simple.
- Know the social networks that are relevant to your subscribers.
- Take advantage of opportunities to allow your subscribers to easily share the content of your e-mail newsletters by adding social-sharing tools.
- Always include links to your brand’s presence in social media.
- Use Twitter in addition to e-mail marketing to address customer service issues, product launches, and special offers.
- Use Facebook to post important information and updates for your biggest fans and brand evangelists.
- If you have a customer community on your Web site, provide links to community content within your e-mails.
- Turn your best e-mail newsletter content into working social applications for deeper engagement with consumers (widgets, iPhone application, SMS alerts)
Image credit, gchutka, via iStock