Where does email marketing stand in the age of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and the like?
It’s still powerful, as much as it was earlier:
- In 2022 alone, about 333 billion emails were sent and received each day.
- The average expected ROI for email marketing is $40 for every $1 spent.
- Two of every three marketers use email marketing to distribute content organically.
- 49% of consumers like to receive promotional emails from their favorite brands.
How does one take this powerful tool and make it the ultimate?
The answer lies in social media platforms and their interactions. They can now give marketers deeper insights than before into the customer psyche.
A marketer can use every fragment, speck, crumb, snippet, or grain of social data to understand what customers want and leverage email marketing to give them exactly that. This article looks at how to leverage social media to transform the outcomes of email marketing campaigns.
Do not separate social media and email marketing
Marketing always intends to create the best possible customer experience. But to develop this ‘complete experience’, marketers must have complete data. It means they must mine data from all customer-facing channels, including social media.
Social media provides close-up data that really lays bare what customers care about, which is exactly what emails need to talk about to get their attention.
Publicly shared information from customers, including metadata, is dynamic and honest. You can learn about customer locations, languages, preferences, interests, likes, aspirations, and more. Once you get volumes of this social data, you can design emails that get people’s attention, interaction, and conversion – in that order.
How to use social media to improve email marketing
Build the optimal subscriber list
Your email subscriber list should consist of people interested in your content. Social data can help you segment the target audience according to location, demographics, and preferences.
Not every user should receive the same structure and content in their email. Curate or create content based on what social data reveals about users, segment them into groups, and customize the emails for different groups. Once you do this, your emails stand a greater chance of being opened and read.
For example, send emails about BTS and Blackpink fashion to the ‘teens’ segment and talk about Korean skincare for career women to the ‘career women’ segment. It ensures you’re not wasting your users’ time with content they don’t care about.
You can also optimize your content with regard to language, send time, local greetings, cultural norms, and much more using social data.
Pro-Tip: Private groups on LinkedIn and Facebook can give you a narrowed audience who are upfront about their interest.
Find ideas for email content
What ideas are trending on social media at any given point in time? Those are what your email content should talk about.
Scan social media conversations (through social listening) to get content ideas that truly generate attention. For example, let’s say you work for a think tank. You notice that everyone is talking about K-pop on social media. Now, given your target audience, you write a piece on K-pop’s history and link it to the Korean economy and email it.
With a single email, you can get the attention of K-pop fans, history buffs, and financial analysts alike. Therefore, even if you’re not in the entertainment industry, you can use a relevant global phenomenon to appeal to customers. In essence, you’re using a social conversation to create email content that grabs eyeballs and retains interest.
Answer customer questions
Customers often tag a brand/company’s social media handle and ask questions. They can also leave questions on the comment sections of brand pages. All these questions offer incredible insight into what customers need from the brand.
Let’s say a lot of people are asking questions about how to use a particular product feature. The next marketing email should feature detailed, step-by-step instructions on that exact feature’s optimal usage. Sending such specific, tailored information – that gives users immediate resolution – also does wonders for your brand’s credibility. When you do this, you become the definition of ‘customer obsession.’
Identify the right time to send emails
Not everyone is online at the same time. Even if they are, not everyone checks their email at the same time. And, it is quite easy to figure out when your audience segment is awake: just check your social media analytics.
An audience most active on social media between 9-12 pm is also most likely to check their email during the same time. Even if they are in different time zones, you can target most of your audience by sending emails during certain hours of the day.
Don’t forget, folks are more likely to open an email they just got, instead of one they received when they weren’t online.
Collaboration, not separation
Customer data (and insights) come from different sources such as websites, apps, push message responses, email engagement, social media, etc. Instead of looking at data from such origins in isolation, bring them together to get a holistic, real-world view of customer habits. Think of it like this: Iron Man can do a lot by himself, but how much more does he get done with The Avengers team? Your email marketing and social media, in combination, can help you understand customers closer than ever before. They can give you all the information you need for tailoring relevant, personalized experiences.
At Netcore, we’re constantly analyzing customer insights, studying trends and forecasts, optimizing data processes at different levels, and bringing innovations to meet the highest marketing goals in email ecosystems.
Netcore has been recognized as “Ahead of the curve at applying AI to marketer workflow” in The Forrester Wave™: Email Marketing Service Providers Report 2022. For the second year in a row, we received the “Highest overall customer rating” as a Customers’ Choice, in the 2022 Gartner Peer Insights “Voice of the Customer” Report.
Most importantly, we send over 20 billion emails a month on behalf of 6500+ businesses across 40 countries. Connect with us to understand how you can benefit from our expertise and experience.
