At first glance, email and social media may seem like two marketing tactics that don’t have much to do with each other. They’re just two different communication channels, right? Two different ways to reach our audience.
What if I told you that email could amplify your social media presence? What if I told you that email and social could work together in synergy? That would be great, right? Here are a few ideas to make it happen.
Get a viral boost from your most loyal fans
Let’s say you post a new video on your Facebook page, your Instagram account or your YouTube channel. You’re probably hoping for some organic (viral) visibility. To get it, you know the first few minutes after posting are crucial: you need to get views, likes and comments quickly if you want the social media algorithms to show you some love.
If you have a good list of email subscribers, you can send them an email announcing your new video and quickly drive traffic to your post. The subscribers on your list are among your biggest fans, so they’ll probably check out your new content quickly and interact with your post.
We tend to think our emails should drive traffic to our website. While that’s true in many cases, why not send traffic to our best social content? Especially if it helps us achieve greater viral reach.
Harness the power of multichannel marketing
In today’s digital world, if you want to stay top of mind, people need to see you... a lot! Ideally, you’ll have several channels through which your audience can connect with your brand. Email and social media can be two of them. Your branding should be consistent across both, but your tone can be slightly different.
You can promote your social media accounts in your newsletter, especially if they offer entertaining, interesting and exclusive content.
You can also do the reverse: share a preview of your newsletter content on social media and encourage your fans to become email subscribers.
Use your contact list to build targeted audiences for your social media ad campaigns
Did you know you can import your list of email subscribers (your contacts) into Facebook Ads Manager and create a custom audience? After the import, Facebook will find your subscribers’ profiles, and you can then use that audience as the target of an ad campaign. In short, this means you can easily retarget your email subscribers on Facebook.
By the way, you can do exactly the same thing with Google Ads. At Cyberimpact, we use this feature to retarget our users with educational and inspiring YouTube videos.
But that’s not all! Once you’ve created your audience of subscribers, you can ask Facebook (or Google) to create a lookalike audience. Their super-powerful artificial intelligence will analyze your subscribers and automatically build an audience of people with similar demographics and interests. You can then advertise to this new group of prospects.
These lookalike audiences on Facebook and Google Ads are among our top performers for generating new Cyberimpact users.
Create an exclusive Facebook group for your email subscribers
We all know that the organic reach of Facebook pages is declining (plummeting, even). That makes groups a good opportunity for your brand. In fact, it’s one of Sprout Social’s 9 recommendations for beating the Facebook algorithm in 2018.
As we mentioned earlier, your email subscribers are probably among your best and most loyal fans. Many of them are probably customers too. So it makes sense to ask them to join your exclusive Facebook group.
A Facebook group can be the ideal place to share useful content with your users and/or subscribers. Members can also ask questions, interact and help each other, which creates a sense of belonging to the brand.
If an exclusive group makes sense for your brand, test it and see whether it drives more engagement than your business page gets.
Use email and social media together to run viral contests
When I worked at an agency, we ran lots of contests, especially for retail businesses. They’re a great way to grow your subscriber list, get excellent visibility on social media and generate sales. Here’s an example for a mattress retailer:
When entering the contest, participants have to provide an email address and are asked whether they’d like to subscribe to the Matelas Bonheur newsletter. Lots of people say yes, and that’s how you build your mailing list.
What’s more, participants are invited to share the contest on social media, and when one of their friends also enters, it increases their chances of winning. That’s how we get reach and engagement on social media.
Much like we discussed at the beginning of this article, you can (and should) launch your contest by inviting your email subscribers to take part. They’ll share it with their friends on social media, which leads to both new subscribers and greater social reach for the contest.
Viral contests like these create a loop in which email and social media work together and feed each other.
So those are a few ways email and social media can work together to maximize reach and engagement with your brand. I hope they inspire you to test new strategies. Can you think of other ways to use email to amplify your social media strategy?
If you aren’t already using Cyberimpact to send your emails and manage your subscriber lists, create your account now!