People often ask, “should I be doing email marketing or social media marketing?”

The answer is that you should actually be doing both! Your marketing efforts will be the strongest when you use both of these channels together.

The biggest reason why a combination of these two channels is more effective than using either one of them by itself is that you will simply reach more people when you use them both. Your email subscribers are not necessarily your social media followers and vice versa. So, by using email marketing, you can reach people who don’t follow you on social media and by using social media marketing, you can reach people who are not on your email list.

However, although you should definitely use both email and social media for marketing, email is the more important of the two. For every $1 that companies spend on email marketing, they average $38 in revenue. This is significantly higher than the return on ad spend on social media marketing. In fact, people who buy products marketed through email spend 138 % more than those who do not receive email offers, such as people who click on social media ads.

Another reason why email marketing is so valuable is that you will actually own your email list and do not have to pay social media companies to communicate with your subscribers. However, social media is rented space. You will have to pay social media companies if you would like to advertise on their platforms.

1. Your Signup Form should be linked in your CALL TO ACTION button on social media pages/profile that helps grow your email list

Adding a signup form on your Call To Action button on your social media pages/profile will help you to funnel people from your social media pages to your email list. By doing this, you can use your social media pages to bulk up your email list.

This is a good example of a signup form you can add to your call to action button.

To get the most out of your signup form, you should use an action word because people respond positively to these. You should also make sure that you clear and concise and promote a benefit, not the product. Further, to get people’s attention, you can ask a question. For example, “Do you want to improve your health with optimal nutrition? Sign up for our email list today to get regular product offers and information for our incredible nutritional supplements.”

Another thing that can help is negative words. For example, you can say, “Stop wasting money with X, sign up here, and start saving.” Negative sentiment has been shown to increase click-through rates by 47 percent. Showing value is also extremely beneficial. To show value, you need to clearly express the value of going with your offer and quickly explain why a pain point may be relieved, why the person’s life may be improved, etc.

2. Engage your existing clients (and find new ones) on social media by uploading your email list on social channels

Uploading your email subscriber list on your social channels is an excellent way to grow your business’s social media following and to be able to get more bang for your buck with social media advertising.

All of the main social media networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. allow you to upload your email lists. Then you can simply follow or send connection requests to the people who are matches for the emails.

Many of them will accept. Once they accept, they will start seeing your posts and your ads, and many will share them. This will help to grow your following even more.

Custom Facebook audiences are also extremely helpful. With a custom Facebook audience, you can advertise to people who are a certain age or gender, or who have shown interest in your website or products, etc.

This image shows you where you can find custom audiences on Facebook ads manager.

Lookalike audiences are also extremely beneficial for growing your list. Lookalike audiences are audiences on social media who have similar characteristics, preferences, and habits to your existing customers. When you are creating a lookalike audience, you should focus on your most engaged audience members. This will help you to maximize your ROI.

3. Your regularly scheduled newsletter/thank you page campaigns should include social media follow us button for live updates notification

When you add a social media follow us button to your scheduled newsletter/thank you page campaign, you can dramatically increase the number of social media followers that you get.

It takes up to seven times to recognize a brand. You can speed up the brand recognition process by making sure that people from your email list subscribe and follow you on your social media channels as well.

Include a button like this in your emails:

When you post content on your social media channels, you should make sure that this content is different than your standard email marketing content. You want your subscribers to feel like they are getting different value on your social media channels than the value that they are already getting on your email list. Try to connect in a different way, with different information.

Imagine where your subscriber will be when they engage the content and create unique content for each space. Give them a reason to follow you in both places.

4. Schedule campaigns for email marketing as well as social media posts

Your marketing campaigns need to include both social media posts and emails.

When you create your campaigns, 80 percent of your time should be spent on promoting your content and 20 percent of it should be spent creating it. Most marketers have this backward. This is because not all people who read content have the time at that moment to engage with it. So, if you post it again later, then there is a greater chance that your content will get more clicks and more engagement.

When you are creating your campaign, you should keep a 360-degree perspective in mind. The goal is for all you to promote your content on all of your channels in order to increase the number of shares and forwards and to get maximum clicks and engagement.

You should build your campaign around recent tweets/posts which have higher amounts of likes, shares, and retweets. These campaigns will most likely perform the best since they have content that has already proven to be very interesting to followers and subscribers.

5. Email marketing campaigns should include the announcement of an upcoming contest/rewards/deals that is going to happen on social media pages.

Announcing your social media contests with email marketing will act as an influencer marketing technique/viral marketing.

Rewards, contests, and deals all help to create a large amount of interest amongst your email subscribers. This is because people tend to love anything that can help them to get something for a reduced price.

This is a good example of a Facebook contest post:

This kind of content is often more effective for email marketing because the average person checks their email 15 times a day. So, it is essentially a guarantee that your email subscribers will see your marketing email with your rewards, contests, and deals content.

However, social media posts tend to be frequently missed since they quickly disappear down newsfeeds and timelines. In fact, the average Facebook user only spends about 27 minutes a day on Facebook. So, this means that many of your Facebook users will not see your posts.

Are You Already Using Benchmark Email?

Make sure that you place the UTM tracking code for the links/page URL that you want to promote via both social media as well as email marketing campaign.

This will help to track and allow you to filter the audience interest, geography, medium, demographic and other analysis for optimization. This will enable your campaigns to be much more effective and successful.