Email and Social Media Marketing – A Perfect Partnership

I’ve found that the best way to keep in touch with my audience is a combination of email and social media marketing.  Together they create a perfect partnership. If you follow my blog, you’ll know that content marketing involves feeding your audience online content to keep them engaged.  This lets you build a relationship, establish yourself as an authority, and eventually make sales.

But there is a difference between the type of content that works in email and social media marketing. In order to do either or both effectively, you need to understand this difference.

 

Captive Audience

With email marketing, you have a captive audience. Your messages go straight to your subscribers’ email inboxes. Of course, they may get messages from other businesses as well, but at least you have their full attention. This isn’t the case in social media, where users’ news feeds are literally bombarded with content.

 

Long-Form

Social media content is, at best, a sound bite. It may be a link to longer content elsewhere. Some of the most popular social media content is memes, which are short messages that can be taken in at a glance. With email, you have a chance to offer longer-form content. Some email marketers create full newsletters, I send out an email newsletter each month.

 

Email Series

One of the best things about email is that it allows you to do a series. You can create a series of related emails to keep your subscribers tuned in. This could be something like step-by-step instructions on a long, fairly complicated process. For example, after subscribers sign up for my Pinterest ebook, they receive a follow-up set of emails giving further tips on using Pinterest. You can’t do this on a social media post, where people tend to just catch a glimpse of what’s going on whenever they have a chance.

 

Social Is Fun

The bottom line on social media is that it’s fun. You can promote or spread brand awareness to some extent, but people aren’t there to shop. They’re there to hang out with friends and entertain themselves. You can send more serious messages when you’re marketing through email.

 

Promoting through Email

Although email content should be helpful, informational and sometimes entertaining, it can be more promotional than social media content. Promotional content generally doesn’t go over so well on social networks. Many people make buying decisions based on email messages, so you can promote a bit more through email or use it to reinforce your sales promotion.

 

A Sales Funnel Tool

Finally, email content works better to qualify prospects. You can use it to determine which of your subscribers is a buyer and which isn’t, and act accordingly. It’s much more difficult to do this with social media content.

If you’re active either on social media or on your email list only, you should consider incorporating both into your online marketing strategy to reap the best benefits. It could be the “happy ever after” element in your marketing strategy.