The Impact of Social Media Interfacing on Email Marketing

(Excerpt from a persuasive document encouraging a small business to interface its social media efforts with the rest of its marketing plan.)

The Situation

Compnay A currently has a presence on LinkedIn with a business page, Facebook with both a standard profile and business page and Twitter. The company is not a member of any social media-based groups. Company A does not have a YouTube page or Digg account.

It’s important to note the word integrate at this point. While Company A does have presences with most of the major social media sites, those opportunities to connect are not offered in any of its efforts to reach clients - they are not integrated into the websites, blog or email marketing campaigns. This means instead of clicking a little blue Facebook button on a website, for example, a client or prospective customer would have to intentionally search-out a connection with the company.

The Impact on Email Marketing

Social and email marketing have significantly different natures – social media is often a reciprocal conversation tool whereas traditional email marketing is designed to efficiently “push out” information to a large group. With this in mind, the first thing to do when considering whether to integrate social media into Company A's email marketing plan is to decide whether an email’s content is share-worthy.

Company A will benefit from social media integration if it is used in its product-centric email marketing strategy specifically. For example in August 2011, Company A pushed an email featuring special offers on August 3^rd promoting the sale of two specific European gold coins. Had this email given the option to share across multiple social media outlets, the offer could have been exponentially spread to at least 130 more people per contact using the “share” function on Facebook alone. The initial email pushed would have also received the benefit of the “breaking news” email titled Urgent Red Alert Buy Gold on August 10^th not to mention the share-worthiness of the second email as a stand-alone.

With strategic link-backs to the Company A blog from both the social media pages and its email marketing efforts, the blog will benefit from increased traffic and will be better suited to direct traffic to a variety of client-relevant landing and product pages on the website.