In today’s world you need to use multiple marketing channels to reach your audience. Email and social media are two big ones and when used together they supercharge your reach, engagement and conversion rates. Both serve different purposes but by combining them you can build a stronger more engaged audience and better results.

In this post we’ll look at the best practices for combining email and social media, answer the questions of how each can support the other and why this is good for your business.

How Can Social Media Help Build an Email List?

One of the biggest challenges businesses face is building a good quality email list. Social media can be a powerful tool to overcome this by using the audience you already have engaged on platforms like Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn to grow your email subscribers.

Here are a few ways to do it:

• Promote Sign-Ups in Posts and Stories: Regularly remind your social media followers to sign up for your email list. You can use a direct call-to-action (CTA) in your posts, stories and videos with links to your sign up page.
• Offer Incentives: People will subscribe if there’s something in it for them. You can offer exclusive content, discounts or freebies to encourage your social media followers to join your email list.
• Use Social Media Ads: Paid advertising on social media allows you to target specific audiences. By running ads that ask people to sign up for your emails you can build a list of highly interested subscribers who will engage with your content.
• Interactive Content: Quizzes, surveys and contests are great ways to get social media users to share their contact information and turn followers into subscribers.

How Can Email Marketing Grow Your Social Media Following?

Just as social media can help grow your email list, email marketing can also be a strong driver of social media growth. Here’s how:

• Embed Social Icons in Emails: Every email you send should have links to your social media profiles, asking readers to follow you on their preferred platform. These links can be visual and placed at the top or bottom of your email for easy access.
• Feature Social Media Content in Newsletters: By showcasing your most popular social media posts, stories or upcoming events in your newsletters you give email subscribers a reason to connect with you on social media.
• Exclusive Social Media Content: Tease exclusive content or social media events (like live Q&As or giveaways) in your emails. This way subscribers will follow you on social channels for more value.
• Cross Promote Social Campaigns: If you’re running a social media campaign or contest promote it in your email newsletters. This cross promotion ensures your audience knows about and participates in the campaign and builds engagement on both platforms.

Why Both Email Marketing and Social Media Matter?

Both email marketing and social media have their own advantages but combined they create a powerful whole. Here’s why both are important:

• Wider Reach: Social media helps you engage with a bigger audience, email allows you to nurture relationships more personally and directly. Together they expand your reach and create a deeper connection with your audience.
• More Engagement: Social media is a real time platform, great for immediate interactions and responses. Email is more personal, you can tailor content to individual preferences. This combination ensures engagement across different touchpoints.
• Ownership and Control: One of the biggest advantage of email marketing is you own your email list. Unlike social media platforms where algorithms can limit your organic reach, your email list is something you have full control over. By combining the two you reduce your dependence on any single platform.
• Diverse Content: Social media is more informal and visual, email allows for in-depth and long form content. Combining both channels allows you to diversify the type of content you share and cater to different segments of your audience in a way that keeps them interested.

More Questions to Consider

As you continue to combine email marketing and social media here are some more questions to think about:

• How will you measure success?: You need to define clear metrics for both email and social media to know what’s working. Tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights and email marketing software can help you track engagement, conversions and ROI.
• How will you personalise content across both platforms?: Personalisation is key in today’s marketing. You can segment your email lists based on user behaviour on social media and deliver more targeted, personalised content to different audience groups.
• What content works best for cross promotion?: Not all content performs equally across platforms. Test different formats like blog posts, videos, infographics or case studies to see what works for your audience in both emails and social media.
• How often should you cross promote email and social campaigns?: Consistency is key to engagement. You don’t want to bombard your audience so find a balance in how often you promote one platform on the other. A mix of regular promotion and special campaigns tends to work best.

End of the Day

Combining email marketing and social media is a win for businesses looking to get the most out of their marketing. By combining the real time and reach of social media with the personal touch and control of email marketing you can build a more engaged and loyal audience that interacts with your brand consistently.

Remember it’s not either or. Email marketing and social media have their own strengths and when used together they create a whole.