How to Grow Your Business Using Email Marketing and Social Media
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The document discusses how social media and email marketing can work together to grow a business. It provides an overview of key social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and blogs. It then gives tips on how to integrate each of these platforms with email marketing strategies, such as including social media links and content in emails. The document concludes by highlighting metrics and best practices for social media and email marketing success.
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How to Grow Your Business Using Email Marketing and Social Media
- 1. Making Social Media & Email Work Together Jenna Jantsch, Social Media Marketing Manager
- 17. How to Grow Your Business with Both Email drives traffic to social media and vice versa.
- 20. Social Media + Email Examples
Editor's Notes
- Good afternoon everyone! I wanted to jump in and get to know each other a little bit before I get started. As Jill mentioned my name is Jenna Jantsch, I am the Social Media Marketing Manager – And that is just a fancy way of saying I do our Tweeting, manage our Facebook Fan page, our LinkedIn group and try to make us at least semi cool with YouTube. I also do a handful of other things, because as you know we are a small business too, and small business employees don’t do just one thing…. but this is probably the best part. So now that you know a little about me – let’s talk about you. Who here is on Twitter? Who here is on Facebook? Who here is on LinkedIn? Anyone here enter our ‘New Deal’ for Small Business Video Contest? Who thinks that social media is a waste of time? Be honest it’s okay you aren’t going to hurt my feelings. Who thinks they are a social media expert? Great so we have quite a mix – this should be fun. Let’s dive in to How to Make Social Media & Email Work Together
- Today we’re going to discuss what social media really is. 5 of the most popular platforms you can use to give your business a boost. You’ll learn how to use both email marketing in conjunction with these platforms to grow your business. I’ll also touch on the metrics you need to be tracking for your success, followed up by some best practices around email marketing and social media And finally the fun stuff, some examples for you to look at.
- Social media as you know is a web-based technology. It take the interactions of one to many much like email marketing, print advertising and radio advertising where we’re all talking AT our potential customers and turns these interactions into many to many meaning, you now have many people communicating to you, as well as taking your message, interpreting it and sending it to people who they know. So what does this all really mean? It changes your customers from consumers to producers of content. You have essentially hired some of your customers for free by just joining social networks. With social media platforms you customers have been given an outlet to speak. And don’t be afraid, you want them to speak – you really want them to speak positively on your behalf. So the question is what can you do to enable that?
- So I decided to focus on 5 social media platforms that are (1) easy to use, (2) in most cases free to use and (3) can get you on your way to boosting your business today.
- So let’s start with Twitter. The first thing you’ll want to do is sign up for a Twitter Account. Make sure you use your company name, or a name that your followers will recognized. Twitter does have some limitations around size, and some times accounts are already created for a specific name you would like. For example VerticalResponse is one letter to long for a Twitter handle….. We needed to get a little creative. We decided on VR4SmallBiz – we thought about what we wanted to do with Twitter, and one of our main goals was to help our small businesses grow by passing advice. When you are setting up your profile make sure your description is key word rich – people need to know who you are and what you do. Next you will want to build up the number of followers you have. Post your Twitter handle on your site, in your email marketing campaigns, on your business cards, and in the signatures of your personal emails. You can see a great example of this on the right hand side were Due Maternity, a maternity clothing site prominently displays their “follow” links right on their blog.
- Twitter and email marketing are a great team when it comes to business marketing. After you launch your email marketing messages post an archived version to Twitter. Many times your subject line is a perfect tweet. But make sure to think about who your twitter followers are. If your subject line is Easter Sale – 15% Off, that is a great subject line for customers who already know who you are – but if someone stumbles upon your tweet and doesn’t know what you sell they might not be as interested to check it out. In that case I would add your product or service to your subject line. The screenshot on the right show you just how easy it is to do this from within your VerticalResponse account. We automatically pull your subject line into this text field for you in case you want to change it. Then you can post it to either Twitter, or Facebook or both! You’ll then be getting your email marketing campaign in front of many more potential customers that aren’t on your list. While I have this picture up I also want to point out the archived link. It is on the top of this image. You can copy and paste this image to show off your newsletter any where you want. We have a few customers that link old versions of their newsletter on their website or blog – they offer them as teasers for people to sign up for their newsletter list – which I personally think is a great strategy especially if you have fresh content every newsletter. Now Twitter Search – Many people who are on Twitter use a handful of Twitter tools to help them search and organize the twitter world. In our office we use, Tweet Deck, CoTweet, Hootsuite, and Back Tweets just to name a few. When customers and potential customers are searching key words really become important. For instance if you’re interested in looking at anyone that mentions chardonnay, you can simply input that keyword and you’ll get all Twitter conversations that have that keyword in the Tweet. So when you’re using twitter, make sure you use keywords you want people to find you with. Also, another reminder to include “follow us on Twitter” links in your email marketing campaigns. Not only do you want your current customers to follow you but you email could get forwarded and you will get a chance to pick up a few more followers. If you’ve got an opt-in form on your site, Tweet to your followers “Sign Up to receive email only offers”, then use the link where your opt in form is hosted. If your followers like you and think they’ll get something of value, you’ll build your list.
- Moving forward – onto Facebook. If you haven’t set up a Facebook Fan page for your business yet – it’s easy, it takes just a few seconds and it’s free. You do have to have a Facebook profile in order to have a Fan page so it’s time for you to join us on Facebook or ask someone in your company to do it for you. You’ll want to invite your friends from your Outlook or whatever email application you use, as well as your current Facebook page if you have one. As you grow your fans will suggest you to their facebook networks and you’ll grow even more that way. If you keep your Facebook followers engaged and they comment or like something on your wall – notifications will be passed around to their network that they did so giving you another way to get in front of their friends. You’ll also want to post to your Fan page any blog posts that you publish, any company news or industry news you come across. If you have a blog it is very easy to set up an RSS feed on Facebook – that way you don’t have to post the link manually. So, what makes pairing Facebook and Email Marketing a success? You can post a newsletter optin form on your facebook fan page an example of what that would look like is shown here. This way you can also offer “email only” offers for those that join. We touched on this - You’ll want to post that hosted version of your email you just spent onto Facebook. It helps exstend the life and reach of each one of your email campaigns – making sure you get what you put into each one. And don’t forget to include a link to your opt-in form in your email marketing campaigns this will help you capture new fans. Include your Facebook links in your email marketing campaigns along with your Twitter handle. Some people just like Facebook more than Twitter or Twitter more than Facebook so you need to make sure you let everyone know you are in both places.
- Moving forward – onto Facebook. If you haven’t set up a Facebook Fan page for your business yet – it’s easy, it takes just a few seconds and it’s free. You do have to have a Facebook profile in order to have a Fan page so it’s time for you to join us on Facebook or ask someone in your company to do it for you. You’ll want to invite your friends from your Outlook or whatever email application you use, as well as your current Facebook page if you have one. As you grow your fans will suggest you to their facebook networks and you’ll grow even more that way. If you keep your Facebook followers engaged and they comment or like something on your wall – notifications will be passed around to their network that they did so giving you another way to get in front of their friends. You’ll also want to post to your Fan page any blog posts that you publish, any company news or industry news you come across. If you have a blog it is very easy to set up an RSS feed on Facebook – that way you don’t have to post the link manually. So, what makes pairing Facebook and Email Marketing a success? You can post a newsletter optin form on your facebook fan page an example of what that would look like is shown here. This way you can also offer “email only” offers for those that join. We touched on this - You’ll want to post that hosted version of your email you just spent onto Facebook. It helps exstend the life and reach of each one of your email campaigns – making sure you get what you put into each one. And don’t forget to include a link to your opt-in form in your email marketing campaigns this will help you capture new fans. Include your Facebook links in your email marketing campaigns along with your Twitter handle. Some people just like Facebook more than Twitter or Twitter more than Facebook so you need to make sure you let everyone know you are in both places.
- Now let’s move onto LinkedIn, this platform is used less for consumer marketing like Twitter and Facebook and more for B2B marketing. If you don’t have a profile on LinkedIn you should create one, it’s easy and free. I’d fill out as much information as possible in my profile. The reason for this is that LinkedIn presents you with information based on the information you give. To make LinkedIn valuable you will want to add connections. You can do this through searching on companies you’ve worked for or classmates you’ve had. LinkedIn can help guide you through this as long as you add the companies you’ve worked for and the schools you have attended. You can also search for people by email address. As a warning when you add connections make sure that you can pick one of the options for how you know this person. I’ve done business is a great way to connect. If you pick the option I do not know this person more than 5 times LinkedIn will actually stop you from reaching out to connections. One of my favorite thinks LinkedIn does is show you “people you may know” with a tool that analyses your profile and your current connections. If you end up knowing someone it is very easy to click and invite them to connect. You can also join groups that share your same interests. This way you’ll be putting yourself in front of people that may not have seen you. You can also, easily link your blog to LinkedIN. Now people might want to connect with you based on the information you put in your blog. When they click to visit your blog, you’ll have an opt in form there to lose the loop and grab their email address. In LinkedIn’s QA: you can answer questions that are pertinent to your business or industry. And if you look at the graphic, you’ll see that there are people 2 and 3 connections away. These are opportunities for you to connect as well. By answering questions about your industry it also helps frame you as an expert which helps build your reputation and popularity. Adding your LinkedIn to your personal emails is a fantastic way to connect with people. If your company is consulting or you are your business you should be asking people to connect with you on LinkedIn in everyone of your email marketing messages. Another great thing to do is to include some of the answers you answered on LinkedIn in your email newsletters. I’m a true believe in if one person ready to ask there are probably 10 people thinking that exact same question – share the love.
- Now let’s move onto LinkedIn, this platform is used less for consumer marketing like Twitter and Facebook and more for B2B marketing. If you don’t have a profile on LinkedIn you should create one, it’s easy and free. I’d fill out as much information as possible in my profile. The reason for this is that LinkedIn presents you with information based on the information you give. To make LinkedIn valuable you will want to add connections. You can do this through searching on companies you’ve worked for or classmates you’ve had. LinkedIn can help guide you through this as long as you add the companies you’ve worked for and the schools you have attended. You can also search for people by email address. As a warning when you add connections make sure that you can pick one of the options for how you know this person. I’ve done business is a great way to connect. If you pick the option I do not know this person more than 5 times LinkedIn will actually stop you from reaching out to connections. One of my favorite thinks LinkedIn does is show you “people you may know” with a tool that analyses your profile and your current connections. If you end up knowing someone it is very easy to click and invite them to connect. You can also join groups that share your same interests. This way you’ll be putting yourself in front of people that may not have seen you. You can also, easily link your blog to LinkedIN. Now people might want to connect with you based on the information you put in your blog. When they click to visit your blog, you’ll have an opt in form there to lose the loop and grab their email address. In LinkedIn’s QA: you can answer questions that are pertinent to your business or industry. And if you look at the graphic, you’ll see that there are people 2 and 3 connections away. These are opportunities for you to connect as well. By answering questions about your industry it also helps frame you as an expert which helps build your reputation and popularity. Adding your LinkedIn to your personal emails is a fantastic way to connect with people. If your company is consulting or you are your business you should be asking people to connect with you on LinkedIn in everyone of your email marketing messages. Another great thing to do is to include some of the answers you answered on LinkedIn in your email newsletters. I’m a true believe in if one person ready to ask there are probably 10 people thinking that exact same question – share the love.
- Now let’s take a look at Youtube. Videos are a great way to get a message across and they are extremely engaging. Try it out. Get a flip cam and record your own video. Many times our customers don’t think they have a good idea for videos. But you can do almost anything with this visual marketing. Restaurants – Film a video of your chef making one of your most popular dishes. Real Estate Agents/Hotel Operators - Host a 360 degree virtual tour of the property or specific rooms. Software Companies – Recorded tutorials are a great selling tool! Manufacturers, Designers - Take a video of your work, how something is made or a story of how a customer uses your products. Non-Profit Organizations - Take a video of those who benefit from contributions and how it has helped them achieve! You don’t want to lose your customers part of the way through the video. We like to try and keep videos under 3-4 minutes. We often mention to include a call-to-action in your emails, but it also applies here. Give your customers something to do from your video. You might want them to visit your website to see more about the topic you filmed, to sign up for a newsletter or contest you may be running, or maybe check out specials you may be running. You’ll want to add tags to your YouTube vidoes, think of the keywords you use on Twitter and in your search . They’re likely the same tags you’ll use for your video. When you create a YouTube channel many people don’t know that you can connect with friends there too. It helps to do this to build your own following. Make sure you link to your video from your blog or website so that your readers know to watch it on YouTube. So how do you make videos and email marketing successful? Video is a very engaging tactic. People understand it and love multimedia instead of a static image. So if you can make it work, post a few videos, include them in your email campaigns and watch your clicks increase. You cannot actually embed videos in our email – they are just such large files that you can’t guaranteed your email would be delivered. We recommend that you include a picture of your video in the email, then have your recipients click through to it. It makes more of an impact that a text link. RECENT STUDIES SHOW YOU COULD GET 2-3X THE CTR WITH VIDEO LINKS/VIDEO IN YOUR EMAILS
- Now let’s take a look at Youtube. Videos are a great way to get a message across and they are extremely engaging. Try it out. Get a flip cam and record your own video. Many times our customers don’t think they have a good idea for videos. But you can do almost anything with this visual marketing. Restaurants – Film a video of your chef making one of your most popular dishes. Real Estate Agents/Hotel Operators - Host a 360 degree virtual tour of the property or specific rooms. Software Companies – Recorded tutorials are a great selling tool! Manufacturers, Designers - Take a video of your work, how something is made or a story of how a customer uses your products. Non-Profit Organizations - Take a video of those who benefit from contributions and how it has helped them achieve! You don’t want to lose your customers part of the way through the video. We like to try and keep videos under 3-4 minutes. We often mention to include a call-to-action in your emails, but it also applies here. Give your customers something to do from your video. You might want them to visit your website to see more about the topic you filmed, to sign up for a newsletter or contest you may be running, or maybe check out specials you may be running. You’ll want to add tags to your YouTube vidoes, think of the keywords you use on Twitter and in your search . They’re likely the same tags you’ll use for your video. When you create a YouTube channel many people don’t know that you can connect with friends there too. It helps to do this to build your own following. Make sure you link to your video from your blog or website so that your readers know to watch it on YouTube. So how do you make videos and email marketing successful? Video is a very engaging tactic. People understand it and love multimedia instead of a static image. So if you can make it work, post a few videos, include them in your email campaigns and watch your clicks increase. You cannot actually embed videos in our email – they are just such large files that you can’t guaranteed your email would be delivered. We recommend that you include a picture of your video in the email, then have your recipients click through to it. It makes more of an impact that a text link. RECENT STUDIES SHOW YOU COULD GET 2-3X THE CTR WITH VIDEO LINKS/VIDEO IN YOUR EMAILS
- If you don’t have a blog yet, it’s easy and in some cases free or very inexpensive for you to have one. Platforms like Wordpress and TypePad can get you there pretty easily. Your blog in addition to your website is an important tool. You might have a website where you might not change content very much. Search engines like when you update your relevant content and can place you higher in the search results if you do update it. Blogs are great for this. They are easy to manage and change. You also have to think about you keywords when you write your blog posts. For instance in each blog post we do, we link the term " email marketing " back to our domain verticalresponse.com. a result for that particular keyword, we're pretty high in the natural rankings for that phrase. If you sell hand-blown glass, you might want to link that phrase back to your home page. I’ve talked to many business owners who use the blog as content for their social media platforms. So when they come up with a blog post, say it’s a day spa giving tips on how to relax during the day, there is content there for them to publish to social media platforms like Twitter, facebook and linked in. Also if you’ve created a video, you can publish this exciting news on your blog as well. They should all be interconnected. It’s also the voice of your business. So many customers want to know there are human beings behind the companies they do business with these days. Blogging is a perfect platform for you to easily do this. Your posts don't have to be long and they should be easy-to-read. People will retweet you and post your blog content to their Facebook pages if they think it's worthy. This could potentially give you access to new readers and new customers. You can track how many people have retweeted your blog content by going to Backtweets.com , entering your blog post URL and page through all of your retweets. You can also add an opt in form to your blog so that your readers will opt in to getting your newsletter updates of your blog. What we do and have seen many customers do is to make the blog content their newsletteer content. It’s especially great if you’re updating weekly or monthly. You have a great reason to get in front of your recipients again with an email campaign. You can include a teaser with links back to your blog to drive traffic to it. You can also include links in the email to your store or site as well.
- If you don’t have a blog yet, it’s easy and in some cases free or very inexpensive for you to have one. Platforms like Wordpress and TypePad can get you there pretty easily. Your blog in addition to your website is an important tool. You might have a website where you might not change content very much. Search engines like when you update your relevant content and can place you higher in the search results if you do update it. Blogs are great for this. They are easy to manage and change. You also have to think about you keywords when you write your blog posts. For instance in each blog post we do, we link the term " email marketing " back to our domain verticalresponse.com. a result for that particular keyword, we're pretty high in the natural rankings for that phrase. If you sell hand-blown glass, you might want to link that phrase back to your home page. I’ve talked to many business owners who use the blog as content for their social media platforms. So when they come up with a blog post, say it’s a day spa giving tips on how to relax during the day, there is content there for them to publish to social media platforms like Twitter, facebook and linked in. Also if you’ve created a video, you can publish this exciting news on your blog as well. They should all be interconnected. It’s also the voice of your business. So many customers want to know there are human beings behind the companies they do business with these days. Blogging is a perfect platform for you to easily do this. Your posts don't have to be long and they should be easy-to-read. People will retweet you and post your blog content to their Facebook pages if they think it's worthy. This could potentially give you access to new readers and new customers. You can track how many people have retweeted your blog content by going to Backtweets.com , entering your blog post URL and page through all of your retweets. You can also add an opt in form to your blog so that your readers will opt in to getting your newsletter updates of your blog. What we do and have seen many customers do is to make the blog content their newsletteer content. It’s especially great if you’re updating weekly or monthly. You have a great reason to get in front of your recipients again with an email campaign. You can include a teaser with links back to your blog to drive traffic to it. You can also include links in the email to your store or site as well.
- One great thing about all of this is that it’s completely trackable. With Twitter you can track how many followers you have, how many people you follow and you can look at your retweets, these are people that have taken your content and retweeted it to their followers. You can also tell how many people clicked on your Twitter links by using a URL shortener, like Bit.ly. For facebook, you can see how many fans or friends you have and how they are interacting with you with their comments, “likes” and updates. LinkedIn will give you your number of connections. And how many people have rated your answers to their questions as best answers. YouTube will give you the number of views on a video and you can see how many comments you have per video. You’ll also see how many friends you have. Blogs will give you number of visits to the blog over time, how many comments you have, how many people are following you through RSS and how many clicks you have on your post links. Email marketing will obviously give you number of opens, clicks and unsubscribes. I love to track how many people have opt-in in on your various social media outlets – to me these end up being the people that love you – and we see very high open rates from our email lists that we have created from our social media networks. But of course your real bottom line? Is really tracking if your sales are going up as a result!
- Email marketing can really be the center of all of your Social Media traffic. Social media will drive some traffic on it’s own, but coupled with sending email to the various social media outlets and having them get people to sign up, will really make you shine. If you’re using your social media outlets to drive traffic to your email marketing hosted campaigns and sign up forms you’re really doing great. So as you can really see it’s a match made in heaven!
- So let’s talk about some social media best practices. Encouraging your customers to engage is important. If you cross promote your social media with your email campaigns you’re off to a great start. You need to be pushing your message with both mediums and getting your customers to subscribe to both and get them talking about you. Don’t be scared of showing off your brand. This is your chance to show what your brand really stands for. Bad reviews? No problem. It’s all about transparency here folks. It’s all about how you address the review. Confront it, then have an answer for it, try not to attack. You will get credit for your response. And you will be surprised at how many of your customers might jump in and try to answer questions too. Stay with it – This is important. Social media success is something that happens over time. You are not going to get 1,000 twitter followers over night. You’ll also want to take a moment out to highlight things other than your business. People want to know you’re human and your employees are human, not robots. People buy from people. Make sure, as we’ve noted you highlight where you are in the world of social media!
- Many of you know, it’s a good idea to make sure your lists are opt-in. You don’t want to be sending email to people that don’t want it. Make sure you speak about the things your audience expects you to speak about. If your recipient signed up for offers about new tires, you don’t want to send them offers about movies. Kim gave a great dating analogy earlier - Make sure you communicate regularly. Subject lines are the most important thing you can think about in your email campaign. You can spend a lot of time getting the email to look right, but if your recipients don’t get the subject line, they’ll never see it. Pay close attention to what will get them to open. Your from label is the part of your email campaign where your recipient shook your hand and agreed to get your email. They look first to see who the email is from, then to see what the subject line is. They place their trust in you, the from label, so don’t let them down. You don’t need a bunch of marketing speak to write your email to your recipients. It’s a more relaxed medium so write like you speak. Be short, use bullets, remember they’re scanning for the good stuff so give it to them quickly.
- One of our customers PetCamp is a great green business in San Francisco and they embrace email marketing and social media. What’s great is that they encourage reviews.. They are asking their customers to review their pet camp employees and when the employee gets a good review, Pet camp will buy the employee lunch. This is a great promotion.
- This is a children’s clothing store called Tea. What’s great about this email marketing campaign is that every month they are asking people to submit photos of their children in the Tea clothing. This one is great b/c it keeps people going back to their Fan page. They pick a winner of a $200 gift certificate every month. You have to be a fan to enter. This should help spread word of mouth and keep people coming back.
- This is a dIY book publisher that does a great job at putting the social media icons front and center as well as a link to the blog.
- We get questions all the time about how to put video in your email. This is a great example of a company that uses video images in their email. When you click on them you’re taken to youtube to watch the videos.
- Look up at the screen
- Thanks for spending time with us, I think we’ll be posting this so you can get this information soon and we’ll email you with it. Another great use of social media and email marketing!