Best Ways to Integrate E-mail with Twitter and Facebook
PrintNow that there is so much talk about people using Facebook to stay in touch, you probably wonder if anyone uses e-mail at all anymore.
In a February 2011 survey of digital-media habits, 41 percent of users said they prefer to receive communications from marketers via Facebook, more than double any other digital platform. The survey, by survey management and data collection firm Ipsos Observer and the trade publication Advertising Age, indicated that consumers primarily want coupons and customer service on Facebook and Twitter.
At the same time, all those e-mail addresses you’ve gathered in the past few years are still a safe bet for long-term investment because social media features can change unpredictably.
Your best option is to use both e-mail and social media in concert. E-mail can make your efforts on Facebook and Twitter more useful, and vice versa. Creatively combining these tools can actually generate more leads and more repeat customers than depending on any single approach, or channel.
A basic tactic is to host a promotion, such as a contest or a giveaway, on one channel and then use other channels to tell people about it and ask them to spread the word. For instance, if you sell kitchen gadgets, you could ask people on your e-mail list and Facebook page to enter their best Sunday morning recipes in a competition. Announce the finalists on both Facebook and by e-mail. In your e-mail messages give people a link to Facebook and ask them to share the top recipes with their Facebook friends. On Facebook you can ask people to cast their votes for the winning recipe. With e-mail you can unveil the winning recipe and include a related discount coupon before you make a more public announcement on Facebook and in your store.
Here are a few other smart integration ideas from Morgan Stewart, chief executive of marketing consultancy Trendline Interactive:
- On Facebook and Twitter you can promote exclusive deals available only to e-mail subscribers. “By reserving certain benefits for e-mail subscribers, you're increasing the value of your program to subscribers and creating a motivation for others to subscribe. The viral nature of Facebook and Twitter make them ideal venues to promote these benefits.”
- When people ask questions on Twitter and Facebook, answer them in messages to everyone on your e-mail list. When one person asks a question, you can bet that many other customers are wondering about the same thing. Telling your e-mail subscribers about the question and then answering it “is win-win: providing valuable content for your e-mail audience while highlighting the benefits of participating on Facebook and Twitter to your e-mail subscribers.”
- Collect e-mail addresses when customers respond to your discount offers on Facebook and Twitter. “The quality of these addresses is high, and tracking the source allows you to easily identify them as Facebook or Twitter users.”
As you incorporate Facebook and Twitter into your e-mail strategy, remember that the pact between you and your e-mail subscribers has not changed. In exchange for their addresses, you still promise that you will send them only relevant messages at an acceptable frequency. Keep an eye on how subscribers react to e-mail messages that have social media links. When subscribers go inactive for an extended period of time, that means they aren’t interested, they've abandoned their e-mail accounts, or perhaps they prefer to engage with you through a different channel. Their response is the best way to discover which channel combinations are working and which are not, and to adapt accordingly.
Business journalist Joan Voight covers marketing, social media, and technology for MediaPost Publications, ClickZ, and other publications. She was previously the editor of two West Coast business magazines aimed at small and midsize companies.
