How Email Marketing Can Up Your Social Media Game

Email marketing is the star kid for any marketer who wants to build a strong relation with their subscribers and patrons. Similarly, in the past decade, social media has been adopted as a quick and engaging communicating channel.

This sparked the argument of “Email Marketing vs Social Media — the Pros and Cons.” While both are unique in their engagement methods and perception from customers’ side, email marketing and social media need not be pitched against each other but together to create harmony. While most are aware about how social media can help your email marketing, we explore the possibility of how email marketing can help you gain more social followers.

5 Ways Email Marketing Can Help You Gain More Social Followers

1. Invite Your Subscribers to Connect as Soon as They Subscribe

74 percent of consumers expect a welcome email as soon as they subscribe. By motivating your newly onboarded subscribers to follow your brand over social media, you are not only increasing your follower count but also adding another touch point for customer personalization.

2. Drive Your Subscribers to Your Online Social Media Platforms

Blogs are a great way to harvest email addresses of those interested to know your brand. With most social media platforms having their own independent blogging sites, you can redirect your email subscribers to these platforms (such as LinkedIn Pulse or Medium) and have them follow you on the social media.

Tracksmith uses email marketing to grow social media audience. | Credit: Email Monks by Kevin George

In the above email by Tracksmith, after customary greetings, they have prominent sections that prompt the subscribers to follow the brand socially.

3. Show Off Your Purchases

The thumb rule for transactional emails is that it can be 20 percent promotional while remaining 80 percent needs to be purely transactional. You can make use of the 20 percent area for prompting your subscribers to share/promote their purchase/experience on social media, which increases your brand visibility and in turn helps in roping in new customers. This is emails helping social media which in turn helps emails.

In this post-purchase email, Kickstarter prompts the supporter to share their cause on social media. | Credit: Email Monks by Kevin George

In the above email by Kickstarter, the email recipient can promote the product on social media by clicking either of the CTA buttons in the first fold.

4. Live Social Media Feeds in an Email

Although this involves a great deal of planning and email tinkering and testing for a flawless campaign, including a live social media feed is a very effective marketing gimmick. In the desire to watch their post being featured in the email, people will definitely engage with your brand. To promote “The Email Design Conference 2015,” Litmus included a live twitter scroller right in their email.

Litmus includes a live social media scroll in this dynamic email template. | Credit: Email Monks by Kevin George

For those interested to know how they pulled this, the email dynamically fetches Twitter users’ names, handles, timestamps, and tweet copy by using nested CSS inside empty <div>s. Every time the email is opened, the email would update the content with latest tweets. You can learn more about how this stunt was pulled off in their blog.

This way, they not only managed to increase the engagement on the social media but also increased the traction on the hashtag making it trend in the email marketing domain.