I know it’s a long title; but, when you combine email and social media, you get one of the most cost-effective and powerful marketing combinations for business I know of.
Your business may be using one or the other or maybe you are using both email and social media. However, to really be effective you need to combine them. If you are having trouble growing your social media, make sure everyone using your company email includes the company’s social media links in their email signature. This could place your social media links in front of hundreds or thousands of people each month. If you currently aren’t using an email marketing service like Constant Contact, Vertical Response or MailChimp, I would recommend you look into it. That being said, let me disclose that I’m a Solution Provider and Authorized Local Expert for Constant Contact, so I will be discussing Constant Contact features in this article.
You may be asking yourself…why do I need an email marketing service? Can’t I just use my Outlook account to market my business? Well, let me ask…can you track who opens your emails, who clicks on a link, or who has forwarded or shared your email with a friend? To sum it up: measurable results and tracking are the key reasons to use an email marketing service. After all, don’t you want results you can measure? Plus, services like Constant Contact have hundreds of templates you can customize to brand your emails, easily add photos, create coupons, manage several email lists and more. You can’t do this with Outlook, Gmail or other email providers. So, if you want to get serious about your online marketing, look into using an email marketing service.
Now that you’ve selected an email service, here is how you can grow your social media presence. First, create an invitation and invite your contacts to follow and like your business sites. Be sure to make it simple for them by including your social media links. Your next step should be to create a good offer for your email readers and then make an exclusive offer, if they like your Facebook page. You can do this very simply with Constant Contact’s Social Campaigns which will hide the exclusive offer until they like the Facebook page. Once it is revealed, they can print out the offer to redeem in-store or online. I’ve worked with accounts that have used this technique and have been very successful increasing the likes to their Facebook page. Please remember that you should use this technique sparingly and the offer should be of real value.
Next time, we will cover how you can grow your email list using social media.
The Social Gloo 