The social era is booming, and fully integrating your emails with social media is a must. To stay relevant with your audience, you have to be where they are- on social media. Adding social media content to your emails can be a natural extension of the emails to drive engagement. Not sure if you’re optimizing the social media content in your emails? Then check out the list of ways you can improve your emails!
Incentives
If you’re going to make your emails more social, you need to start with a strategy that gives your audience a reason to engage with you socially. Think from the perspective of your personas- what’s in it for them? Including special content that’s only available to subscribers can be a nudge to follow, like, or subscribe. Coupons and savings only available through engagement can be another strong motivator. However, make sure that everything being promised is delivered on. If you don’t intend to send out 20% off coupons every month, don’t tell your audience that’s the benefit of subscribing to your newsletter or you’ll lose trust.
Consider using a subscriber preferences center where the user can opt-into and manage what they want to receive based on interest, location, frequency, etc. This can help you target them with communications they actually want and increase their engagement.
Include Your Social Links
Social media icons in your emails are a must, but make sure the recipient knows where the link will take them. Especially if you are promoting other content in the email, including a “Follow us at” can be helpful in managing their expectations of where the link will go.
Social Media Email Campaign
Part of an overall strategy to revamp your social media should include an email campaign that promotes your social channels, as well as why the recipient should be engaging with your brand on these channels.
Content Social Sharing Links
One of the best ways to drive engagement with your social media content is by creating sharable links. These lessen the amount of time it takes for a recipient to post your content on their social media. It also widens the reach of your content every time it is shared, so making this process as easy as possible can be key to reaching a larger audience. Click here to learn how to create a social media share button in your Right On Interactive emails.
In addition, once you’ve been able to track what content was the most shared, you can utilize that by promoting it on your website. In today’s sharing economy, reviews by people matter more than ever, and knowing what content others found the most valuable resonates more with your audience.
Email Social Sharing Links
Beyond sharing individual content, you can also add links that enable the recipient to share the entire email on their social media. These emails that include a social sharing button generate 30% more click through rates than an email without a social sharing button. Click here to learn how to create a social media share button to share an email in Right On Interactive.
It’s important to make sure that it’s obvious what the social sharing links do so recipients know that they’re either sharing individual content, the whole email, or visiting a social media page. The more links you add, the easier it is to get confused about which link does what. Be obvious, be creative, and be social in your emails!
Click to Tweet
Sharing links can be added to emails without being formatted with a social media icon. If you’re sending a personal-looking email and don’t want to disrupt the tone of the email, consider just adding text that is a “click to tweet” link on the statistic used, or fact stated. This is an easy way to get your community engaged with your emails without changing the voice of your brand or the tone of a message.
Social Media Feed
Embedding a social media feed directly into your email is one of the most direct ways of linking email with your social channels. Tweets with a certain hashtag, Facebook feeds, Instagram photos all can be embedded into an email. This is a great way to encourage the recipient to “join the conversation” and directly place them into that social media channel.
Our friends at Litmus have a great example of what this can look like. However, this is some pretty in-depth coding and can be more challenging to send out successfully.
Optimizing social media content in your emails is a great way to engage with your audience and reach a larger network. If you’re interested to learn more about how you can utilize social media to grow your community, check out our post How to Social Media Engagement Metrics to Build a Stronger Community.
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