So you’ve crafted the perfect email campaign. One that reaches your subscribers with a message that resonates and stirs them to action. But do you stop there in your effort to reach as many buyers as possible? What else can you be doing with your email content?
Content marketing doesn’t work in isolation; there are marketing channels that are complementary and work in unison. When it comes to content, you want to ensure that your messages reach all audiences. In other words, you want to send out a message via email, but you also don’t want to neglect consumers on social media – especially when 40% of them say LinkedIn is important for researching technologies and services to purchase, as well as 19% saying the same for Twitter. The question becomes: do all messages apply to all audiences across all marketing channels?
In an effort to deliver relevant content across social media, we have to be smart about the kind of content we create. Our goal should be to reach the largest audience possible, and because this is what we want to accomplish, we have to take advantage of social media consumers who can share our content within their own networks. After all, with the advent of the mobile, in 2014 consumers doubled their sharing activities, according to a Q4 Social Sharing Report from ShareThis.
Should email content be shared with social media users?
Email content should be used as much as possible when it is relevant. Depending on the circumstance, we either want to share our email content across social media, or we leave it only to our email campaigns. This is why leading marketers are always working on creating the kind of content that can be shared across all channels – including email and social media.
Different offers, different goals
Let’s say, for example, that you want to send out an email to only your customers who you are inviting to attend your event. This doesn’t need to be promoted via social media because the target audience is already-existing customers. This is where email marketing messages and social media messages don’t intersect. The event could be tweeted or posted on Facebook, but the invitation itself should be only sent out through email to engage consumers 1:1.
The email/social media dichotomy is extended to when we want to send out a press release regarding platform updates. Here we would want to reach email users who have logged onto the platform recently. However, when it comes to additional tools that have been added to the platform, we can share the press release on Facebook and Twitter.
How about newsletters? According to Nielsen Norman Group, newsletters are still considered to be a great way to grow or maintain relationships, even during times when people aren’t actively making purchasing decisions. Newsletters hold aggregated material that spans everything from best practices to industry updates and trends. And this kind of information is something that we want everyone to know about. Newsletters are inherently native to email, but posting content from your newsletter on Facebook and tweeting it out will do just fine.
What kind of content do you share on both email and social media? Have you had a campaign in which you’ve left messages separate between the two? Have you had campaigns that you’ve shared content on both? There is a fine line when it comes to social media and email content sharing. What does your strategy look like?