Email marketing still has a place in modern marketing strategies; in fact, it should be at the core of your content marketing, lead generation, and customer retention efforts. According to HubSpot, "99% of consumers check their email every day, and it is by far the preferred way to receive updates from brands."
Many audiences prefer email communication over other channels (with over 70% of millennials preferring this approach). Because it's such an important tool for reaching all of the warm leads of your audience, don't just keep email marketing in a box as a solo project. Instead, integrate it into all of your marketing strategies so it can strengthen each effort. Read through these tips to see how you can start effectively integrating your marketing strategies.
Integrate Email Marketing and Social Media
Social media marketing has three primary purposes: engaging or informing audiences, generating leads, and growing your contact list. Your social media profiles across each central platform are an invaluable tool to add more people to your email list (rather than representing an end goal themselves).
Social media followers are already interested in your content or services, so providing them even more content will strengthen the relationship. Once you add your social media contacts to your email list, you can send them:
- Frequent newsletters
- Updates about your products, services, and seasonal sales
- Longer forms of the content you provide on social media, whether that's entertainment or educational content
- Promotional offers and discounts
So, how can you turn social media followers into contacts on your email list? Add calls to action to your posts and paid advertisements. Encourage your audiences to click on the link and subscribe to gain access to the particular content you're offering.
Pro Tip:
Your email lists can also feed social media growth. Add buttons leading to your relevant social media profiles in your emails.
Tie Email and Content Together
Content marketing is all about creating content that will be there when your audiences want to find it. For example, an HVAC repair company might have a blog post about the most common causes of poorly cooling air; when their target markets start searching for a solution on a search engine, this blog post will be there to give them information and encourage readers to schedule a service appointment.
This basic premise of inbound marketing works across virtually every industry and incorporates any type of content, including articles, videos, podcasts, graphics, and more.
You can grow your email subscription list through content marketing by:
- Having a contact form and a CTA to join your list in your blog articles
- Ask blog subscribers their preferences for being included in your email lists
- Use email as a vehicle for your content: You can do this by releasing sneak previews of your content via email newsletters, having content you only share over emails and notifying readers of new content via email.
- Gate your content: Instead of putting it behind a paywall, put it behind a contact form requiring readers to subscribe for access.
Don't Forget Mobile Optimization
Mobile marketing and optimization isn't so much a marketing strategy as it is a universal requirement for doing business or marketing online. Your website, emails, and content have to be completely accessible from mobile devices. Not only does this change the formatting to fit smaller screens, but it also changes the nature of how audiences interact with sites.
While you may have made sure your website was mobile-friendly during Google's search to mobile-first indexing, go through your marketing assets again to ensure your email marketing services and content are easy to read and enjoy over smartphones of all sizes.
This includes testing your templates across different devices, providing the text and graphics size properly and don't override each other, and your CTA buttons are functional. Another way to make your emails pop is to embed video and graphical elements — without slowing down the load time.
Fuse Email Marketing Into Your Digital Strategy
If your email marketing assets tie into campaigns across different channels and campaigns, they need to have a consistent tone and branding feel. You can accomplish this by creating style guides that help content creators from other teams present a cohesive style. Over time, you can easily use email content for blog content (and vice versa) with minimal editing.
You can also integrate your email marketing by following these tips:
- Every email should include CTAs and button icons to your blog, social media platforms, relevant service pages, and other popular landing spaces.
- Allow for a seamless experience across all of your online channels.
- Make sure your emails tie into individual shoppers' buyer journeys. Smart email marketing software can automate this process based on cookies, omnichannel marketing records, and more.
- Use email marketing segmentation so you can identify what types of emails should be sent to different contacts. Differentiate based on social media platform, new customer/repeat customer status, and more.
Make Your Marketing Strategies Stronger With a Media Partner
Email marketing is one of the strongest ways to communicate with your audiences consistently. It helps you stay top of mind while presenting relevant, persuasive information. At WNEM Marketing, we can help you use your email marketing strategies in conjunction with other digital marketing efforts to communicate more effectively with your audiences.
