Tips to run a marketing campaign with social media and email

Companies have more options than ever before when building out their marketing campaigns.

Fifty years ago, marketers were mainly using newspapers, television, billboards and radio to raise awareness about products and services. Today, they’re using anything from guerilla marketing tactics to digital campaigns to get their brands in front of consumers.

But just because a platform or medium is new and innovative doesn’t mean it will be effective with your marketing campaign. In many cases, the most popular channels are still the best for reaching your customers.

This article will explain the benefits of using email and social media marketing campaigns. It will also describe five ways you can use the two mediums together to build a marketing campaign that increases your engagement and conversions.

Benefits of a social media marketing campaign

Social media continues to become a more essential to our daily lives. And it’s growing more popular with each passing day. Every second, 11 people use a new social media platform for the first time. That adds up to more than a million new users every day. That’s also about 500 users since the time you started reading this article.

Even though it’s had some negative publicity over the past few years, Facebook is still king among social media channels. The number of monthly users has grown every quarter during the past 10 years. In the 4th quarter of 2018, the company reported it had more than 2.32 billion monthly active users. If you add in the number of people using any of the company’s other products (WhatsApp, Instagram, or Messenger), Facebook says that number is closer to 3 billion people.

Facebook is still king among social media channels.

Image Source: Statista

With so many eyes on social media, it’s natural that more marketers are using this medium for their marketing campaigns. Social media is a great place to reach a large number of people to build brand awareness and drive traffic to your website.

Since your social media messages are available for everyone to see, it can be difficult to deliver a targeted message. Paid ads allow you to control your audience to a degree, but there are still people who will likely receive your message from outside your targeted demographic. (However, you can run ads that just target your existing email list—more on that later.)

Therefore, your social campaigns should be primarily focused on the top of funnel or the attraction stage of the buyer’s journey.

Benefits of an email marketing campaign

Email marketing remains one of the most successful types of campaigns you can run. It’s no secret that email marketing offers one of the best ROIs in the business—for every dollar you spend, you earn an average of $44 back.

An email marketing campaign can also be more effective at targeting different sections of the sales funnel or buyers journey. Emails can be used to introduce new prospects or leads to your company or product. They can also be used to nurture relationships that help close deals and convert your contacts into customers.

Sending targeted messages is one of the biggest benefits of using email marketing. Through careful list segmentation and automation, you can control exactly who’s seeing your message and at which stage of their journey. This is extremely helpful in delivering personalized communications to your contacts when they need it most.

Personalization helps add trust and loyalty to your company, which leads to more conversions. In fact, email is 40 times more effective than Facebook or Twitter at acquiring new customers for your company.

While emails can work at any stage of the sales cycle, they generally provide the best results in the middle to bottom of the funnel or the decision stage of the buyer’s journey.

5 ways to build a marketing campaign with social media and email

Email and social campaigns are successful in different ways. But that doesn’t mean they can’t work together to provide additional value for marketers and customers. Some of the best marketing campaigns you can run will seamlessly integrate email and social media elements.

Here are five easy ways you can use social media and email together to build a successful marketing campaign.
 

1. Add social share icons to emails.

One of the easiest ways to add social media to your email campaign is by adding social media share buttons or icons to your emails.

Most companies these days will include links to their social channels in emails. These are great for getting people to follow you, but they aren’t as successful at encouraging people to take an action as part of your email campaign. Unless, of course, the goal of your email is simply to get people to follow you on social media.

Consider adding the option for your contacts to share your email or a specific part of your email on their own social media channels. Doing this can increase your email click-thru rates by as much as 158%.

Take a look at this example from food delivery service Postmates:

 add social media share buttons or icons to your emails
Image Source: Postmates
 

The company didn’t encourage customers to share the whole email. Rather, they asked contacts to share a discount code, which they hope will entice new users to sign up for their service.

It’s worth noting that you can’t control who sees your email once your contacts share it. So this strategy is best left for top of funnel and discovery messages.
 

2. Incorporate user-generated content in social and email.

You can encourage collaboration between your email and social campaigns by asking your customers to submit user-generated content.

This tactic does wonders for your engagement and can positively impact how your products are viewed by customers. The majority of millennials feel that user-generated content is a good indicator of quality and has some influence on what they buy.

There are simple ways you can utilize this to your advantage with your email and social campaigns. Consider this email campaign created by Black Milk Clothing:

You can encourage collaboration between your email and social campaigns by asking your customers to submit user-generated content.
Image Source: Photoslurp
 
The email encouraged customers to take photos of themselves wearing clothing that was purchased from the company and post on their social channels using a specific hashtag. Black Milk Clothing then featured some of their favorite pictures in a future email and gave everyone who appeared a $50 voucher.

In addition to creating excitement and boosting engagement, this campaign created a sense of fear of missing out for customers who didn’t win. You could easily replicate this campaign with your own brand and products.
 

3. Use email to promote your social media campaign.

Just because a social campaign is strictly intended for your social followers doesn’t mean you can’t promote it on email.

Check out how Sephora used an effective email to raise awareness of its Instagram contest:

Check out how Sephora used an effective email to raise awareness of its Instagram contest:
Image Source: Campaign Monitor
 

The email is very straightforward with a single CTA that pushes people to learn more about the contest. It also provides the company’s Instagram handle and enough details that customers will want to log on and see how they can win the trip to Paris.
 

4. Target your email subscribers with social ads.

Social ads are generally an estimate at best when it comes to defining your audience. However, there are ways that you can target your existing email list on Facebook by creating custom audiences.

This allows you to send similar messages to your segmented audiences without bombarding their inbox. For instance, you could set up your campaign so contacts who open an email but take no action receive a follow up message in the form of a Facebook ad.

set up your campaign so contacts who open an email but take no action receive a follow up message in the form of a Facebook ad.
Image Source: Facebook
 

You can see from this Facebook ad that CB Insights wants their customers to download a report. So rather than sending an email asking them to do it, they put that CTA on Facebook where they know their audience will be.
 

5. Build up your email list by using social media.

In addition to sending social ads to your email list, you can also build your email list with your social ads. Rather than a CTA to download a report or visit a landing page, you could just use Facebook to create an email sign up form.

Here’s a sponsored ad that theSkimm put on Facebook to collect new email addresses.

Here’s a sponsored ad that theSkimm put on Facebook to collect new email addresses.
Image Source: Marketing Land
 

These lead ads had immediate returns for theSkimm. The newsletter site saw a 22% increase in lead quality by running these targeted ads on Facebook. The trick here is to select the right audience to target with these ads. TheSkimm did a good job selecting a group in its target demographic as well as a lookalike audience based on its current active subscribers.

 

Wrap up

You don’t have to choose between email and social media in your next marketing campaign. There are plenty of ways that you can utilize both strategies to build stronger initiatives.

Before you build your next marketing campaign, consider how you’ll integrate social media and email. It doesn’t have to be a big step at first. But as you get more comfortable, you’ll start to notice more engagement and active leads coming from your campaigns.
 



Are you ready to elevate your marketing campaigns by combining email and social media? Request a live demo today and we’ll help you build a campaign that’s perfect for your company and your customers.

About the Author

Emma is an email marketing platform that gives you all the tools you need to send campaigns that really connect with your subscribers. With our

More Content by Emma Email

Want to engage your audience and grow your brand? Try Emma's robust easy-to-use product today.