The more social media followers you have, the better your brand visibility. It will enhance your business growth by bringing in more traffic to your website. This will in turn boost your search engine ranking too. Email marketing can be an effective tactic to garner more social media followers and enhance the social media presence for your business. Even though EMAIL is king and social media is not going to replace it in the near future, you cannot disregard the importance of social media to boost your business. Social media is not merely a craze, it is a marketing channel that is worth using.
Given below is a visual representation that throws light on the growth of social media visitors over the past ten years.
Here are some simple and actionable points on how you can gain social media followers through email marketing.
1. Include social media links in your email
The safest bet to get more social media followers is by asking your subscribers. Just let them know that you have an active presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. Following you on social media would imply that they would be the first to learn about all your upcoming sales, contests, events, etc. This can work as a good temptation for your subscribers to interact with you on social media channels.
Take a look at an email by Crate & Barrel. They have included a “Get social with us” section in their email footer to engage their subscribers on platforms other than EMAIL.
You can even send out an email newsletter to encourage subscribers to connect with your brand on social media.
Here’s an email example by McDonald’s.
2. Incentivize the subscriber who engages on social media
Offer an incentive to the subscribers who follow you on social media. Let’s say for example: You can incentivize the subscribers who like your Facebook page or retweet your tweet and advertise this through emails. Also, promote this on your website to get more visitors on your social media profiles.
3. Incorporate a live social media feed in your emails
Including a live social media feed in emails will be a fad among email marketers in 2019. With the changing algorithms on social media, it will be of utmost importance to use emails to promote your social media channels. A live social media feed in emails means that you can add a section of live Twitter/ Instagram/ Pinterest/ Facebook feed in the email that gets updated automatically whenever the user posts anything. For example: If an email is sent on Monday, it will fetch the most recently posted tweet that was posted on that day. The advantage of this tactic is that if the subscriber opens the same email on Wednesday, the feed will get updated to show the latest tweet posted on Wednesday. Clicking on the feed will redirect the subscriber to the social media platform, thereby driving more engagement, views, and followers on your social media channels. The same applies to Instagram wherein you can have a grid-based layout that lets you show either 9 or 16 most recently posted Instagram photos.
4. Have a better list building strategy
Any business that wants to build a better social media following through email should have a quality (longer) list. Having a better email list will bring in more visibility on your website as well as social media. It will also aid your word-of-mouth marketing since people are likely to share interesting and unique social media posts with their friends or family. Eventually, you will get more customers and better profit for your business. Your business website should have an easy-to-fill subscription form on all the important pages that are frequently visited by potential subscribers. Keep your forms short and simple and limit the information you request. Make sure you strictly follow the rules put forth by GDPR to avoid any inadvertent legal issues regarding list building.
5. Add more calls-to-action
Call-to-action buttons are your gateway to conversions. Make them enticing enough to generate more click-throughs and prompt the reader to act. You can use CTAs to drive diverse actions like buying a product, sharing a link, downloading a free resource, or signing up for a free trial of your service. That said, you can use a clear CTA to invite your subscribers to like your page on Facebook and follow you on Twitter and Instagram. Make the most of every opportunity you get, to spread awareness regarding your social media presence.
6. Organize a social media contest
Enhance your brand credibility by holding a social media contest or giveaway and leverage email marketing to get more participation. You can even have a co-hosted event and then share the leads that you get. This would help you get more subscribers as well as social media followers. You can even run a referral marketing campaign – ‘Refer and Earn’ to grab more attention from your target audience.
Wrapping Up
Amalgamate social media and email marketing to get the best of both worlds. Marketing efforts, if not driven in the right direction, will not get you anywhere. The best idea is to have a unified marketing strategy and run consistent multichannel marketing.
Have you employed any unique tactics in your emails to gain more social media followers? Do share your ideas in the comments below.
