How Does Email Fit Into Social Media Marketing?

These days everyone is talking about social media marketing and how it is becoming the most important feature in marketing for businesses. But adding social media to the mix with good old email marketing gets even better results.

Using your own email list versus a bought email list

Email marketing is still very much alive and the results with this cost-effective advertising method are as good as the effort you are putting in it. Best results are achieved when you have collected the prospects’ and customers’ email addresses on your list yourself.

It is best not to use a bought or rented list because you can never be sure if that list is too old or truly targeted. Only brand new lists where all the addresses are valid and receivers haven’t been bombarded with emails may get some results. But the risks are very high in using a bought list. The recipients may not be interested in your business at all and easily report you as a spammer. It is not worth risking your reputation as a business. If too many recipients report you for spamming your IP address, server and domain can be registered as spam and you may struggle to send any more email marketing in the future. Bad reputation also spreads fast in today’s social media sharing environment. That is obviously something a reputable business wants to avoid.

Linking email newsletters with social media marketing

Email marketing can easily be combined with social media marketing by adding your Like, Tweet and Share buttons to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. on every email newsletter. These are the same familiar buttons that you have seen on blogs such as this one. Using these social sharing buttons your newsletter subscribers can share your information and offers with their friends and colleagues. You just have to make the newsletters so interesting and valuable that people are compelled to share what you are saying. You’ll see how viral your email marketing has become from your successful results.

Reversing the power of social media

While people are connecting on social networking sites more and more every day, it is a great platform to promote your email newsletter. Talk about the topics in your social network accounts, give snippets of the information you are covering in your recent or upcoming newsletter articles and then include links to them. Also have an opt-in form on your social media accounts with an incentive to subscribe. That will make it easy for new prospects to become your newsletter subscribers.

More information on email marketing for business can be found here: Business Email Marketing.