Embrace the Power of Social and Email to Propel Customer Engagement and Eventually, Lead Generation and Conversion

Social media continues to be the most innovative channel for content marketers and brand agencies to promote content and build a credible audience-base. According to We Are Social, there were 2.8 billion users on social media in 2017 globally. In 2018, social continues to be at the forefront of marketing battles.

Social pages for businesses have become a marketing staple. Easy to use, share, react, and micro-manage influencer trends – social media platforms are more versatile than other martech tools!  They serve as great stepping stones to build your email list organically and increase sign ups or subscriptions. Why do we say this? For starters, let’s get the numbers crunching.

The Power of Social & Email

• Every 15 seconds, a new social media is account (We Are Social and Hootsuite)
• 71% of people with a pleasant social media experience are inclined to recommend that brand to peers (Ambassador)
• There were 3.7 billion email users in 2017. By 2021, this number is expected to reach 4.1 billion (Statista)
• Mobile email users across the world are expected to number over 2.2 billion by the end of 2018 (Radicati)
• US brands are expected to spend $3.07 billion on email marketing by 2019 (Statista)
• 89% of marketers consider email to be the premier channel for lead generation (Mailigen)
• The median ROI for emails is 122%, which is 4x above any other marketing forms (DMA and DemandMetric)

These numbers are significant and CMOs along with their email marketing think tanks should ponder over how the power of social and email can help propel customer engagement and eventually, lead generation and conversion.

Present Live Videos/ Live Streaming

Personalization standards are at the pinnacle for social marketers. Visual content engages and resonates better with audiences, irrespective of the device they are using.  Facebook Live, YouTube, Vimeo, Twitch, Periscope, and now even Instagram Live offers you a great opportunity to promote services or/and products, special offers, and plenty more. Videos can also be repurposed which is an added advantage. There’re tools out there that enable video repurposing in an array of creative ways like —

• Video-to-audio podcast using Audacity
• Video-to-blog post using Rev.com
• Video-to-One-minute trailer for Instagram using Instasize
• Video-to-Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram story using Cutstory
• Video-to-Twitter trailer using Legend or Twitter Media Studio
• Short videos into single long-form video using Camtasia, Cyberlink PowerEditor, or iMovie

So, how could email marketers leverage this fascinating angle in their campaigns! You’re engaging customers in real time through videos and they are becoming aware of your core expertise as you interact with them. This is where you need to be street smart and invite them for email subscription for more about the subject or added information solving a definite purpose. The smartness lies in subtlety here.

Here’s an example —

For a KAM video, if a customer is engaging on the ROI angle, you can say – “to learn how to determine the right ROI metrics for KAM please subscribe and stay updated”. Overpitching or random bombardment for subscription are landmines you should never step on.

Create Focus Groups for Product Recommendations, Live Updates, and Much More

Social groups help develop a spirit and sense of community because the content shared is more specific and tailored to the group dynamics. No one shares a Tarantino movie trailer on a group for marketing automation! It’s called spamming and one needs to refrain from doing so.

The enthusiasm of your current customers on these focused groups can rub on to others and make them interact with you. Social groups also lead to improved responsiveness which in turn makes you trustworthy as an information source and also as a brand. Just like in the above case with videos, you can use social groups to constantly encourage your audience to sign up for your emails. It’s really a fabulous way of developing an organic mailing list.

Audience Development for Segmentation and Personalization

The ‘one size fits all’ for any form of marketing is a thing of past. A veteran CMO and a budding entrepreneur under-30 may be in the same line of business but feeding them regularly with similar emails is like shooting in the dark. Analyze social media interactions very carefully to identify your audience needs and then segment them accordingly to personalize your email content.

• In 2017, personalized and segmented emailing were the most productive email marketing strategies (DMA)
• Segmented email marketing campaigns increase email revenue by 760% (Campaign Monitor)
• Opens and clicks for segmented email campaigns are respectively 14.31% and 100.95% more than non-segmented ones (MailChimp)
• 51% of marketers agree that segmentation of email lists is the best personalization tactic for email marketing efficiency (Ascend2)

Email Engagement and Audience Targeting with Offers or Contests

Everyone loves a freebie once in a while. No B2B or B2C barriers here. From a $500 discount for an ABM conference to free goodies at Starbucks or Amazon, there’s no limit to how you can please your audience. With social media, especially a platform such as Twitter, you can run contests where you appeal people to sign up and stand a chance to get something cool in return. Twitter contests for email sign ups with the incorporation of right hashtags can go viral quickly. The better the giveaway you offer, the higher the probability of sign-ups or subscriptions.

Would Engagement Sans CTAs Work?

Call-to-actions  (CTAs) are effective subscription and traffic drivers. Be it newsletters or monthly trivia updates, they tend to work.

Marketers can get creative here and provide compelling, eye-catching icons or pop-ups to invite visitors to decide. A ‘no thanks’ or ‘not now’ option is also important unless the content is gated.

Facebook on its menu bar allows businesses to create a ‘sign up’ CTA on company pages. For other social platforms, simple posts with CTAs can help engage audiences with your emails. To catapult CTAs further, accompanying visuals or headers with sign up benefits is a good tactic.

But once someone opts to not subscribe, avoid being a bug. Retarget strategically. According to HubSpot, 78% of people unsubscribe due to too many emails from a brand.

Optimize Before Deep Dive

First, let some numbers do the talking here:

• 3% of people delete emails that are not mobile optimized while 30% of them unsubscribe for the same reason (BlueHornet/Mapp Digital)
• 20-75% of opens for emails are accounted via mobile based on email type, product, and target audience (eMailMonday)

Google AMPs are almost a ‘dream come true’ for businesses but mobile optimization is not equivalent to AMP-enabled pages. AMPs are about faster load time while mobile optimization revolves around mobile UX. Sending informative newsletters and emails is great, no doubt. But the stats above clearly indicate that any hiccups in reading or viewing on mobile can lead to disengagement and vice versa.

Maintain Content Hygiene; Keep it Premium

Irrespective of what products or services a business is into, marketers need to think of social media as a tool to showcase the ‘how’ and ‘what’ of the business and invoke a sense of curiosity within the audience. They shall look forward to your next post or email. And, to do that, nothing succeeds like premium, hygienic content snippets.

For services, content on demos, and for physical products, content on specifications are good foundation stones. This can then be succeeded with a ‘learn more’ or ‘know how’ buttons that lead to sign-ups or subscriptions.

Another crucial factor to email sign-ups is what social content audience sees first. Hook your most important posts in terms of business relevancy, brand image, and appeal at the beginning of your social pages. Stay clear of stagnancy and periodically change this hook.

Twitter allows you to create a Lead Generation Card which sets your pinned tweet at the top of your profile and adds a ‘subscribe now’ button below it. With that, people can subscribe to your emails in only two clicks.

Email Will Stay, and Social Will Get Bigger

As consumers inch more and more close to a completely mobile and social first world, emails will hold their own as a medium of meaningful engagement. CMOs and their teams need to lay out a comprehensive plan that links social and email marketing. Getting it right could well be the perfect recipe for marketing success going forward.