When it comes to online marketing, a brand message is seen one instant and replaced by another company’s message the very next second. Staying top-of-mind with your audience is vitally important for converting leads into customers, particularly in the e-commerce world where short-lived, flash sales and 48-hour promotions are common.
In today’s post I’ll cover five ways you can integrate email and Facebook into your marketing strategy to ensure your audience is thinking about your brand when it comes time to make purchasing decisions!
Create a Cross Channel Campaign
When promoting a sale it’s a good idea to use multiple channels to get the message across – Facebook and email often make for a great combination. People spend an average of 44 minutes per session on Facebook looking at updates from friends and promotions from brands they “Like”. In addition, retail is the top industry that has aquired customers from Facebook. Additionally, Forrester research shows that email marketing is still the top-performing channel for sales (particularly repeat sales).
Putting together a cross channel marketing campaign combining Facebook and email is not as intimidating as it might appear. Actually, it’s as easy as one, two, three:
- Draft an inviting and informative email.
- Combine a summary of the email with an eye-catching image and post it on Facebook.
- Use a variation of your Facebook post to create a low-cost Facebook advertisement that supports your organic marketing efforts.
As you can see the copy, headline, and call-to-action you use in your email can be repurposed for use in your Facebook post and the Facebook ads. See, it’s not so scary after all!
Create an email that is eye catching and informative.
Repurpose your email and transform it into a Facebook post.
On a side note, it’s important to keep track of how your promotions are doing on Facebook and email. This can be accomplished by providing a unique promo code for each channel. Once the promotion has ended, you can review your data and apply the information you gather to your future promotional attempts. For example, if you strike it big on Facebook and tons of people are converting, then you might consider spending more time promoting on Facebook in the future. It might also encourage you to revisit your marketing strategy for the channel that was not as successful.
Add an Email App to Your Facebook Page
Including an app on your Facebook page that hosts an email signup form is another simple yet effective way to make the most out of email and Facebook for your marketing efforts.
Taking advantage of the Facebook app capability is a great way to grow your email list.
In the signup form you should include an incentive for users who are interested in making the leap from being a Facebook follower to an email recipient. Getting a Facebook user to signup for your email list is very valuable because not everyone who “Likes” your page will see each of your Facebook posts (due to EdgeRank, Facebook’s algorithm). Though not everyone will open each of your emails, you at least ensure there the message arrives in a place where they will see it.
Also, keep in mind that it’s completely okay if people see a campaign message on both Facebook and in their email. This reinforces the message – and if done right, will encourage viewers to act on it the second time around if they hadn’t already the first time. Sometimes we all need an extra prod or two – especially since we may see something exciting in our Facebook Newsfeed and then forget about the campaign message two seconds later.
Grow Your Audience with Email/Social Only Promotions
As we’ve already seen, getting your audience to engage with you on Facebook and in email is ideal – but sometimes this task can be a bit challenging. Providing your audience with incentives, if done correctly, can encourage people to connect with you on both channels. For example, you could post to Facebook saying “Sign up to receive email specials and you’ll automatically receive a 10% off promo code as a thank you!”
Likewise, in your emails you should encourage people to connect with you on Facebook. This can be accomplished by saying something along the lines of, “Don’t forget to Like us on Facebook to participate in our latest contest – the winner will receive a FREE [prize]!” Just be sure that you mix your content up on these channels – cluttering your page with promotions can be tacky.
Use Facebook Engagement Data to Create Exceptional Emails
On Facebook your company can get quick, real-time feedback on a number of things, including which products are more popular than other products – all you have to do is ask! You could ask your audience to vote on which product they want to see go on sale next. Simply ask them to comment on the post with Option A or Option B (or the product name), or set up a voting widget using software like Shortstack.
Once you receive a good number of votes, go ahead and start a promotion around the winning product – and email the promotion out to your entire email list (or a segment of your list).
A/B Test Images, Copy and Calls-to-Action
Using a sophisticated email marketing platform, such as the one HubSpot offers, allows you to a/b test many elements within your emails. Now imagine a world where you could one-up your email a/b test response rates by fueling them with hard social media data before you even begin your email a/b test!
Make use of a tool, such as Hubspot, that allows you to a/b test your emails.
Using low cost Facebook ads you can begin a/b testing many different versions of images, copy and calls-to-action that you’re considering using in an email campaign. Using Facebook ad management software you can quickly set up 3, 5, 10 or more ad variations at one time (of course how many variations you should actually create depends on how large of an audience you’re able to target – too many ad variations with a small audience will mean you’ll never reach statistical relevance) that can be a/b tested against each other.
Once you have a couple of winning headlines, images and body copy samples you can then set up your email a/b test. Adding this extra step before you begin your email campaign testing will ensure that both email options you’re testing will be engaging to your audience – now it’s just a matter of which one your email audience finds more engaging.
By integrating your Facebook and email marketing efforts you will increase the likelihood that your message is seen by your target audience – which in turn can help drive more revenue.
Are you integrating your email and Facebook marketing in ways not listed here? If so, comment below and share your ideas to help your fellow marketer’s out!
