Social media and email marketing
Email marketing is a proven communications medium and its strengths are relationship-building and customer retention – maintaining contact with customers and prospects that may not yet have purchased at all, have lapsed, buy sporadically or be one of your regular purchasers.Juice has a strong capability in email marketing and employs a range of platforms to suit any email marketing requirement.
What’s new
One of the biggest innovations in email marketing in 2009 is to integrate social media into email marketing campaigns.Increasingly, it is replacing other means of trying to disseminate email content beyond the immediate distribution list. It may also help your email content go viral.
A traditional dissemination method was the Forward-to-a-friend (FTAF) mechanism. In practice, most people ignored the FTAF function and just used the native email ‘forward’ command. This prevented the sender from knowing the identity and email address of the extra subscriber.
Larger brands have started to include links to social media sites in their campaigns. On the other hand, email subscribers may not be so keen on the idea of letting brands and marketing content into their social media hang-out places.
However, marketers who are able to align their content with the mindset of consumers as they engage in social networks are attracting traffic. It takes sensitivity and knowledge of what type of content works and what doesn’t work.
Facebook link
Let’s take Facebook as an example. To be able to persuade your email subscribers to share your content or message with their Facebook Friends, we can embed the link in your email.Once the link is posted to a subscriber’s profile, their Facebook Wall is updated, which basically alerts their Friends to the fact that they have read the link or feel it is important.
This not only shows up on their own Profile page, but also shows up in the news feed of their Facebook Friends.
Showing up in multiple news feeds is when you start to communicate with that user’s entire Friend list. This process has the potential to create viral content as people click the ‘Like’ icon, leave comments or share the item with their friends.
Using social media with email marketing starts to achieve the social media leverage that makes social media marketing really effective.