Social media tools and tactics for email marketing

by Jordie van Rijn Email marketing and social media go well together. But where is the catch? If your company is active with email marketin...

by Jordie van Rijn

Email marketing and social media go well together. But where is the catch? If your company is active with email marketing and on social channels, there is an added bonus. You can combine them. But there are quite a few challenges. So how do you combine email and social for your company?

Your challenge

So what are the challenges in combining social and email? It largely depends on the tools available to you and your own tactics and market. Integration of social media in your email marketing strategy is a bit different for different companies and industries.

Based on the available tools and tactics you first need answers to these questions:

• Can we combine customer data from multiple sources?
• Can we plan campaigns and follow ups beforehand?
• Can we monitor what, where and how people are interacting with our brand?
• Can we bring our message to scattered audiences across the various channels?

Social and email tools available to you

For each of these questions it is even more important to consider whether it can be easily done. It doesn’t matter if the tools and tactics are available. It matters if they are available to you, right now and in a form that is simple enough to use – and that’s after factoring the stress on budget, knowledge level and other in-company limitations.

In social media marketing channels, companies need to pay attention to the tasks that add value as an extension of their digital strategy. The adoption of channels is defined by the amount of effort in relation to the added value they bring.

Easy implementation is required if more marketers are going to use it. E-mail marketing / Twitter / Facebook / Company Blog / LinkedIn / Google + etc. are all channels that can work effectively together. But…. not every company has the resources to do it well.

The good news for email marketers

There is some good news for email marketers. These days, social media features are a standard addition to email tools. This increases the array of tactics an email marketer can easily employ, bridging the combination of email + social and making multi-channel communications simpler.
Barbara Ulmi wrote a white paper comparing the interaction of email & social to a tango. With the added social media features in email marketing software it becomes more about the client, than about the tools.

Next time I will dig deeper into the type of social media tools and functions that are available in bulk email solutions.


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