Why email and social media go hand in hand

Multichannel marketing, when done well, embeds a greater sense of loyalty from the client and increased sales for you. Two very complementary forms of marketing are email and social media. Both can be extremely targeted. This intimacy and ability to personalise mean that they have the potential to work really well together.

The foremost important thing to keep in mind is what the aim of your marketing is. If you’re creating a Facebook page, don’t just do it because society expects it without any forethought as to what it can do and the level you can achieve with it.

Taking a short while to plan out an objective and aim will make the time spent on the social media more worthwhile and also the effects are more likely to be positive. At this point it is a good opportunity to plan how it will sit with other marketing activity, including the email communication strategy.

Key points to consider

• What social media do you want to include?
  Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, Foursquare…
  
  
• Who will be responsible for it?
  Quick responses to the posts and comments are essential. Poor communication on your social platforms can be more damaging to your business or brand than not having one.
  
  
• Customer care and user help
  Do you normally use email for this? If so, this information can and needs to be rewritten for social media. It is still a good idea to send a personal response via email to the person who asks a question. Answer the query in a polite public manner and respond to the question via email. This engenders trust in your brand.
  
• Does the message represent your brand?
  Is it consistent with your other marketing/communications strategy? Is there brand synergy with the emails that are sent to users and the social communications?
  
  

• Encourage people to interact with you via email, website and social media
  You can do this by cross-promoting on all your marketing platforms. Use links to your social media on your email and website to encourage people to interact with your business/brand through multiple channels.
  
• Similar does not have to be the same
  Use social media to make your brand accessible, for instance. You can show people not only the product, but also the people and reason behind it. Follow it up with an email strategy that has a complementary message to push the sales and integration.
  
  The message needs to be consistent. This approach will be less effective if the email is very formal or if the social strategy is overly informal. The skill is to play on the strengths of both but in a way that complements each other.
  
• Who do we use?
  Don’t have two separate people or organisations working on social networks and email or, at the very least, if it is separate make sure there is a clear shared objective and regular communications reviews with all parties (including the agencies working on other marketing activity).
  
• Canvas opinion
  Use social media to find out what people want to receive via email and then implement it.
  

A final word on email and social
Email marketing and social marketing need to be on the same page sharing either a common or complementary aim. It has taken many years for email to become part of the bigger marketing mix as opposed to a separate entity. We need to learn from this and not leave the benefits of social media platforms out on a limb.

Sara Watts, Managing Director, Data Media and Research (dmri)