Just because you have a fancy email going out, it doesn’t always mean that the functionality is there. The goal of having an email list is to expand your company’s reach to new and potential followers, while keeping your existing followers happy. It’s important to remember this on your journey. With the rise of easy to use, powerful widgets; you can easily connect people to and from your emails to other social media networks or links. Picture yourself as your company’s follower:
- Who else would I want to share this information with?
- What call to action will get you to follow this companies social media networks?
- When could I expect more exciting information?
- Where can I gain more knowledge about your services?
- How easy is it to get to this information from this email?
Then widgets allow you to connect to all of your links, share buttons and follow us icons to your social networking accounts. The standard placements of these widgets are normally found within the sidebar, header and footer of your email template.
Using social sharing buttons in email messages resulted in a 30% higher clickthrough rate on average, according to a study by GetResponse.
Just don’t be shy to try new structured social media placement ideas and other concepts. Remember, no marketing campaign is the same, however they tend to use the same elements. Finding out the proper technique will come with research and learning your target audience.
For instance we tried this phrase: “Hey! That’s not all we want to offer” at the bottom of one of our marketing campaigns, then the call to action showcased a special deal only if you liked their Facebook Fan Page. It exploded. With an increase of 39% Facebook followers within the first month, it’s a clear indicator that by adding certain elements, you can do loads for your bottomline!
Just a Few More Subtle Tricks We Found That Work
- If you have an active blogger or social media follower that communicates more than everyone else, be sure to engage this person as much as possible, and give them the support right back — perhaps with free content, or maybe with a free item. Sometimes a simple reply is all they need.
- Talk about the “Hot Topics” from your social media and blog discussions within your email newsletters.
- Set up auto “Welcome” emails with an overview of what they can expect from your newsletter.
- Use incentives that your followers will act on to share your information. For example, “Share this email with 10 people on Twitter or Facebook and you will receive a $10.00 coupon.” While this might sound antiquated, it has led me to engage services like AppSumo, and other content providers I’m interested in.
- Set up an active alert emails to get the word out about your new social media contest or promotions. Then make sure you showcase the winners.
- This is easily overlooked, but have all of your employees’ emails include links to your social media networks.
- Use the “Keep it Simple Stupid” rule, because most users have the attention of a four year old after eating a pound of sugar-coated candy. Make sure your call to action is larger than the rest of the email’s content. And to the point. There are acceptations, and I have been proven wrong with one marketing campaign I have done that, in retrospect, obivously needed a schematic approach, based only on details.
The Number One Rule About Marketing
DON’T SPAM! This will help in the process of destroying your online community that you are trying to build. You will even get banned from most email sites, like MailChimp.
Happy mailing!
