How Social Media Drives Better Email Results

According to 2 recent reports, marketers are seeing better results when combining email and social media tactics. While integrated marketing approaches are nothing new, email and social media are especially complimentary marketing tactics.

Email is a proven and somewhat traditional technique for getting the word out. Social media can produce the same effect. But the same content will not always work in both mediums. So why are they complimentary?

First, social media can reach a different target audience than email. Content strategy needs to be considered and offers may need to be adjusted. Registration-required content is not always viewed favorably by social respondents. But free summaries and short video snapshots can tease recipients enough to gain contact information for longer, deeper and more valuable content.

Another reason these 2 tactics are complimentary is that email can produce additional followers for your company’s social channels or newsletters through “Follow Us” functionality and subscriptions.

Finally, adding share functionality such as TweetMeme and AddThis will allow your email campaigns to reach a much larger audience than your house or rented lists.

A recent study by GetResponse showed that adding social sharing in an e-mail increased click-through rates by 30%, adding a twitter share option increased response rates by 40% and adding as many as three sharing options increased response rates up 55%.

Similarly, a recent report from eMarketer titled The Future of Social/E-Mail Integration highlighted the 2 most popular social media and email integration points as adding a Twitter share option in emails and sending blog entries to email lists.

by Michael Brenner, July 6, 2010