The Power Of An Integrated Social-Email Marketing Campaign

Omnichannel marketing campaigns are on the minds of many brands, as outlined in “Back to Basics: Retailers are not Ready for Cross-Channel Integration,” a 2016 Yesmail Marketing Channel Report. As the study notes, nearly a third of retailers surveyed cited integrating email with other digital channels among their top three email marketing priorities for 2016.

Among the variety of marketing channels available, many brands are looking to integrate their email and social efforts. Sixty percent of retailers have already integrated the two channels, and the combination is an intuitive one that more marketers will likely pursue in the future. In 2016, it’s estimated that there will be more than 2.7 billion global email users, and popular social channels generate an equally impressive following. Twitter has 320 million monthly users, and Facebook alone has over one billion registered profiles. Considering the high number of active social and email users around the globe, all brands and retailers can benefit from creating campaigns that drive traffic and engagement between the two channels.

With something as simple as a link, branded hashtag, or social share button, marketers can encourage users from email to social and vice versa. What’s more, as brands themselves continue to exchange siloed infrastructures for more fluid teams with overlapping responsibilities, it will be easier than ever before for departments to work together toward these integrated campaigns. Many companies already have existing social and email efforts, and combining the two can help them execute digital campaigns with greater personalization and relevancy.

How It’s Personalized

Although brands are often limited by the confines of their subscriber lists, integration with social media opens them up to an entirely new pool of consumers. At its core, social media functions as a network. Users are encouraged to interact with one another, and–due to the peer nature of sites like Twitter and Facebook–consumers are apt to trust and engage with content posted by their friends. Although users may never have thought to interact with a brand before, personalized recommendations from trusted social media peers can convince them to engage.

With this in mind, marketers can create digital campaigns that leverage the interconnected, personalized tendencies of social channels. In the same way that companies like Uber reward existing users for facilitating connections with new ones, brands can integrate email campaigns with social platforms to interact with shoppers otherwise unavailable. For example, brands can offer subscribers 20% off via email, with the promise of an additional 20% off when they share the promotion with a friend. While subscribers may never go on to make purchases with their discounts, as brand advocates they multiply marketing reach within the social space and introduce marketing teams to new sales opportunities.

With embedded social share buttons, marketers can encourage subscribers to move easily from email to social. Marketers can better control branded conversations, monitoring every one for engagement and then reach out accordingly.

How It’s Relevant

As brands create content and digital features that funnel consumers from one channel to the next, they can use social data to improve traditional email efforts. Thirty-six percent of marketing departments already use social media usage data (e.g. a “like” of a brand’s page or the share of branded content) to improve the relevancy of email campaigns. For example, if consumers like a brand’s content that features an ad for shoes, that brand can follow up with users via email, sending a coupon for that product or a recommendation for something similar. And this works both ways. If subscribers interact with an email containing a promotion for sneakers, marketers can encourage purchases by reminding shoppers of that deal with germane messages on Twitter.

This even applies to campaign types. If shoppers are responding most to a specific type of email (perhaps ones heavy in sales opportunities leading into the holiday season), brands can mimic this engagement and post similarly designed content on social. Again, the same works in reverse. If social users are responding to a specific piece of content, marketers can drive engagement on email by deploying something comparable to subscribers.

As the other two-thirds begin to inform email campaigns and social media data with each other, all brands can increase the relevancy of their content by serving consumers content they are already showing an interest in. While notions like “sentiment” are great for tracking whether campaigns are resonating with consumers, they hardly scratch the surface of what’s possible when marketers bring together customer data from multiple channels. Rather than solely defining success with immediate reactions to digital campaigns, brands can use big data insights to determine how well campaigns are working over a longer period of time. Both in store and online, brands can leverage these trends to serve consumers content that they actually care about and want to engage with, building stronger relationships with shoppers along the way.

The integration of email with social is just a first step, and marketers can expand to additional channels like SMS and direct mail to better understand consumers in the future. As brands continue to develop a holistic understanding of how shoppers behave and what they prefer online, they can better tailor outreach and boost ROI across all channels involved.