Social media &
Using Social Media Marketing to Build your Email List
Filed under: Email marketing, Guest Posts, Social Media
There are hundreds of social networking sites but the dominant ones are: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (for professionals). Growing your company’s network on these platforms has many benefits in terms of being able to directly target an engaged audience who have shown an active interest in your product or service.
It is great to have this user base but the value of it is significantly decreased if you don’t effectively leverage it. Creating clever Facebook status’ that will compel people to hit the ‘Like’ button or even better ‘Share’ will help to gain brand exposure but does it convert to sales for your company? At the end of the month, that is what online marketing managers are judged on. A growing number of consumers use social networking to do just that, networking with their friends; do they really want to be bombarded with corporate messages and purchasing calls to action?
Value of Email Addresses
If your followers, fans, subscribers or connections are engaging in the content you are pushing through social media channels then maybe it’s time for a test. This works particularly well if the content you share is on an external site (the company blog for example) but can be put in to action by the majority. One if every five of your external links to content should have a data capture form for emails that will allow the user to access the information, image, video or a mix of all 3.
Knowledge about the value of email addresses is rapidly growing so consumers now want something in return for their valuable asset; offering ‘free’ content is just one of those ways of capturing this data that is used across the industry. Variations of this include offering a discount code, early access or entry to a competition. While this form of email list building is not revolutionary, this test adds value in a number of ways to your online marketing strategy.
How does this help you?
Firstly, and the main point of this article, is to grow your email list. The benefits of this are clear; you have more people to market to when you do your email outreach! You may be asking what value the above tips have to the standard email acquisition techniques; quite simply, using social media to these landing pages increases traffic, reduces the reliance on other marketing activities like PPC and CPA campaigns. Most importantly, however, the quality of the email addresses you are getting is much higher due to the social media source. The social network sites have basically acted as a filter and a first opt-in to engage with your company so those who take that a step further are likely to convert to customers (or repeat customers) once marketed to through email communication channels.
Conclusion
To make the most out of this social media email list building strategy, use an email marketing service like iContact to separate this user base from the others. The main benefit of this is that you can push the same messages that are converting well on the social networks through your email distribution channels to aid engagement and conversion rates. As with all email list building exercises, try to genuinely add value through the content you distribute and avoid anything that consumers will class as spam. Keep it natural and watch the conversions from social media interactions to complete checkouts saw!
Image credit: WeirDealsOnline, Freedigitalphotos.net
Posted on: October 12, 2012
