Email marketing and social media marketing seem to be two different worlds. Companies often choose one over another.
But what if you tried to use social media marketing to support your email marketing campaign efforts?
Social media marketing strategies can offer you a lot of value. According to Hootsuite:
- 97% of digital consumers have used social media in the past months
- 50% of the global population is actively using social platforms
- 43% of consumers use social media to find products and follow at least one brand
- social media gives brands an opportunity to reach audiences of all ages and social circles
On top of that, social media users share a lot of information, which brands can use for their marketing efforts, including email marketing campaigns.
This information is called social data and often includes:
- demographic details (age, gender, location, language)
- biographic information about social media users
- feedback (likes, comments) and shared links
How can social data be incorporated into your next email marketing campaign to make it successful?
If your next email marketing campaign focuses on the same target audience that follows you on social media, you can use social data for your benefit to discover useful metrics and develop different strategies for your campaign.
So, let’s take a closer look at how you can use social data to launch a successful email marketing campaign.
1. Forming and Segmenting Your Target Audience
Building the subscriber list for your email marketing campaign is the foundation of its success in the future. To ensure that this success happens, social data can help you form and segment the target audience for your email marketing campaign.
In the Analytics tab on different social platforms, you can find social data that can help you do customer segmentation for your email based on any criteria, from age and gender to location and language.
Here’s how it looks on Facebook:
This data on audience demographics can be extremely helpful when forming and segmenting the target audience for your net email marketing campaign. It helps you see who will be more responsive to your emails as well as in which language they should be addressed.
2. Developing Content for Email Copy
Social data can help you determine in which language to create your email copy. But what about the content preferences of your target audience? How can social data help you create content for your email copy?
The content that you’ve already posted on social media can be your inspiration for the email copy. You can analyze social data from the feedback received from your followers regarding your past posts:
The data on reach and engagement that you can see in the image above can be used to determine your audience’s content preferences and pick content ideas that would suit the purpose of your email marketing campaign.
On Twitter, you can go further and mine data on your audience’s interests. Whether it’s embedded software or couture fashion, you can detect any interest in this tab and use it for your benefit when writing an email copy:
Similarly, you can find general content preferences in the Analytics tab of every social media platform. This data shows which content your audience likes in general, not just limited to your posts. This information can be a great source of inspiration for your email copy.
3. Sending Your Marketing Emails at the Right Time
An important step in any email marketing campaign is figuring out when it is the right time to send your email to make sure that it gets opened.
If you are targeting the same audience that follows you on social media, you get audience activity insights from social data.
Every social media platform shows you when your audience is active:
On the graph above, you can see that the audience is the most active before 9 AM and after 9 PM. This time can be connected to different time zones, but your task is to target as many of your subscribers as possible when they are the most active.
The time when they check their social media may indicate the time they also check their email. You can use this data to determine the right time when your audience is the most active to increase the chances that your email gets opened, and that you reach the majority of your subscribers.
Over to You
As you can see, email marketing and social media marketing, the two seemingly different strategies, can actually be used together to help you achieve your goals.
Social data that you receive via your social media marketing efforts can be very helpful to determine and segment the target audience, develop content for your email copy, and make sure that your audience receives your emails at the right time.
Hopefully, our tips will help you make the most out of social data and use it to launch a successful email marketing campaign.