Email marketing can be a highly effective way of communicating with your customers.  If you have been doing email marketing for a while, chances are you have a large distribution list that you can easily reach out to with a single click of a button.  Using products like ConstantContact, MailChimp and others can also give you visibility into who is opening your emails, which emails are no longer valid, and more.

Including a Social Media plugin with your email (like nutshell from ConstantContact) is a great way to start building a following.  These plugins allow people to “like” your site on Facebook or follow you on Twitter, but that is only the beginning of what “participating” in social media is all about.  Once a user decides to “follow” you on a social site, they expect to get useful information! If you are like most email marketers you use email for things like newsletters.  Newsletters are a great way to give your customers a summary of what is happening with your company, but they do introduce a few modern problems. Here’s how to solve them.

Social Media has changed the way email is read.

·         Social Media communication equals “Get to the point”.  Social media sites limit the amount of characters you can use to communicate.  Trying to fit a newsletter into 140 characters is impossible.  As a result of this limitation people are inundated with many tidbits of information daily from all manner of sources they choose to follow.  Sounds crazy, but your customers love it and they are even starting to prefer it.  This is not good news for your newsletter and here is why.  It’s obvious the customer likes your company or they wouldn’t have signed up for your newsletter, but are they really reading it?  Because the short burst nature of Social Media is starting to take over, people are now more likely to skim it rather than absorb the information.  Are they really getting the information you are trying to get across by skimming it? The more Social Media takes hold, the shorter the attention span of your customer will be and that may result in their not opening your newsletter at all, or even unsubscribing.  You need to do whatever you can to keep the attention of that customer.  This may seem like a dire outlook for email marketing and especially troublesome because you put a lot of valuable time and effort into creating it.  There is good news, however. If you are already creating a newsletter, you are ready to hit the floor running with Social Media.

·         Here is the best tip I can give you for adding social media to your existing email marketing: Use the same content, just spread it out.  You probably gather information over the course of a week or a month to include in your newsletter.  If you will be running a special or have a new product to promote, instead of waiting for the newsletter to be published, summarize it and schedule it to be posted to social sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn over time.  This is the perfect way to handle social media.  Spreading the information out into more digestible chunks will not only ensure that your customer gets your message but it also reminds them of your business on a more frequent basis. 

Don’t interpret this blog as a declaration that email marketing is dead – it’s not.  It is still a very valuable tool to reach your customers, but it requires you to adapt to modern habits and technology.  Adding an effective social media strategy along with email marketing is a great way to keep electronic communication successful.

Johnathon Howard

CMO

FYItag, Inc.

FYItag provides tools that help streamline social media exclusively for business.  For a product demonstration and a free 30 day trial please visit FYItag.com