Most email marketing is only as good as your email marketing list, but by encouraging recipients to share you message on Facebook and Twitter multiplies the reach of your message many times over. Rather than marketing directly to those on your email list it’s time to think of engaging content that will encourage them to “Tweet” and “Like” your contact and share it with their social media networks.
If you want a way to tie your social media marketing with your email marketing then iContact have the solution. Over the weekend they rolled out a series of advanced social media tools to enhance how email marketing engage links with Facebook and Twitter.
iContact’s Social Tools now allow users to add “Like” and “Tweet” buttons directly to emails through their MessageBuilder tools. Once a message has been sent, recipients can share the email with their network of friends and followers by simply clicking on the “Like” or “Tweet” button. Sent emails are archived and saved as a web page, this gives a URL which Facebook likes and Twitter tweets can link to.
The new Social Tools also allow users to auto-populate Tweets ensuring your Twitter username and on-brand messaging is maintained as it is propagated throughout the Twitter-sphere. All you need to do is make your content compelling enough for recipients to want to share, for example could be discounts, promotions or unique content of interest to your target audience.
What makes the new social tools really valuable is the ability to track the social impact of your email marketing. Instead of just seeing a numeric value for the number of Facebook “likes” an email receives, iContact enables you to measure views coming from direct email recipients, Facebook posts, Twitter posts, and other third party sources. The visibility provided by these tracking tools allows you to measure the results of your social media marketing.
Lack of insight has prevented many small and medium sized companies from truly engaging with social media marketing techniques. With the launch of iContact’s Social Tools we are able optimise both email and social media strategies and deliver the intelligence required to understand which of your marketing techniques is delivering the most results.
John Hayes, iContact EMEA Business Development Executive
If you’re interested in easily adding social media links to your email marketing then iContact offer a free email marketing solution as well as paid for options for larger subscriber lists.
16 Responses
Hi Chris,
Thank you for sharing this, I think this is a fantastic idea on how brands can get the most of our their email marketing campaigns(especially with the content that comes with it). I like how the email can be automatically turned into a webpage.
With these technologies on hand, the more we understand the need to offer quality content because it is the ultimate driving force for that one click on the Like and Tweet button.
In addition to the traditional email marketing (mass email) one should look at another marketing opportunity and that is the emails we all send from our corporate email addresses every day. I represent a company that has developed a solution for just those emails and thus this post.
The basic idea behind wrapmail is to utilize the facts that all businesses have websites and employees that send emails every day. These emails can become complete marketing tools and help promote, brand, sell and cross-sell in addition to drive traffic to the website and conduct research.
WrapMail can also be used to create personal email stationary based on social networks (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, MySpace) hobbies, interests etc for anyone’s personal email.
Wrapmail is available for free at http://www.wrapmail.com and wrapped emails arrive with no red x!
This is what we’ve been educating our clients for almost a year now. “let’s make it ‘Mosial’ and see how responses increase manifold.”
A growing number of recipients today want their participation. We must listen to them and let them have their say.
A very good read 🙂
Has anyone had a lot of luck promoting their website using Deliciouse and Digg?
I don’t use social media in my emails or ask people to “tweet” or “like” anything but boy do I get replies that want me to “tweet” or “like” something, but I am never quite sure what I would be “tweeting” or “liking”.
I may be wishing I had jumped on the social media bandwagon later but for right now I can’t “retweet” or be your “friend”, sorry.