Turn Your Email Newsletter Into A Social Sharing Hub!

Your email newsletter provides a great opportunity to act as a “connector” between the various consumer touch points that you maintain.  By adding social sharing tools to share content as well as promoting links to connect with your brand on your social network pages within your email newsletters, you empower subscribers to share.  It also allows you as a marketer to identify which subscribers are sharing the most.  These brand evangelists can then be identified, segmented, and leveraged as an elite group of net influencers.

Keep these factors in mind when applying your email + social media integrated strategy:

• Understand what motivates your subscribers to share
• Deliver dynamic content that is relevant on the subscriber level as much as possible
• Make calls to action clear and simple
• Know the social networks that are relevant to your subscribers (social technographics)
• Make sharing tools obvious and ask subscribers to take action.
• Always include links to your brands presence in social media (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, RSS feed, YouTube, etc)
• Use Twitter in addition to email marketing to address customer service issues, product launches, and special offers.
• Use Facebook to post important information and updates for your biggest fans and brand evangelists.
• If you have a customer community on your website, provide links to community content within your emails. (Polls, forums, message boards, ratings, etc.)
• Take advantage of opportunities to allow your subscribers to easily share the content of your email newsletters by adding social sharing tools such as “Share This.”
• Turn your best email newsletter content into working social applications for deeper engagement with consumers (widgets, iPhone application, SMS alerts)

Tags: Email Marketing, Facebook, Social Media, Twitter