Techniques that once stood alone are coming together to form powerful alliances.

Although some “gurus” still proclaim that one has mastery over the other, the most savvy small businesses are seeking to harness the power of email marketing and social media marketing (drum roll please)—AT THE SAME TIME!!!

Crazy, right?

Well, the good news is … you can too!

Here are 11 simple things you can do to maximise your marketing efforts using email and social media together to get more customers.

1. Link back to your website from your social profiles and your newsletter

The smart way to do this is to link to a specific landing page on your site, rather than your homepage. Think about why your social follower wants to visit your site and give them what they’re looking for as soon as they arrive.

2. Post on social media about your newsletter or email update

Use a tool like our Simple Share function to automatically post to your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts when your newsletter is published. It’s totally customisable and on LinkedIn and Facebook you can include a picture, too.

3. Encourage newsletter readers to share your email with their networks

You want more readers who are like your current readers, so tap into their networks by asking them to share your newsletter. Two great ways to do that are with our Sharebar and using Click To Tweet.

4. Include links to your social profiles in your newsletter

Don’t just shove a social icon on your newsletter, tell people why they should follow you. Is it for articles, quotes, discounts, jokes, or something else? They will want to know.

5. Invite your newsletter subscribers to connect with you on Facebook

When you launch a new social campaign, tell your subscribers with a single purpose email. Tell them why  they should “Like” your Page and give them a deadline for the freebie to be over. To learn more about this, check out our Social Campaigns.

6. Let social subscribers know when your email is coming out

The day before your email newsletter is due, post an update on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to let people know what’s going to be in it, and that there’s still time to sign up. Don’t forget to give them a link to your sign-up page (not your homepage).

7. Use a mailing list sign-up app on your Facebook Page

Constant Contact has an app called Join My Mailing List. If people come to your Facebook Page and they are interested in what you do, you can nab them for your email list whilst they’re there, by encouraging them to sign up on your Page itself. I recommend you customise the app thumbnail to match your brand and alter the default text to tell people WHY they should join (e.g. “Get Offers Here First”).

8. Pin your newsletters on Pinterest

Go to your newsletter archive and view your latest newsletter. Now pick out a key image from your newsletter and pin it to one of your Pinterest boards. THEN (and this is the important bit), link it back to your archived newsletter. It will give you extra exposure and some nice SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) benefits, too.

9. Use content snippets from your newsletter on Twitter and Facebook, and link them back to your email archive

Yes, here’s another one using your archive. The easiest way to post your content snippets is to schedule them using a tool like Timely.is or MarketMeSuite. You can post several to go out over the next few days all in one go. To make the most of your archive, remember to include a nice clear “Join My List” button on your newsletter, so that if someone lands there from one of these snippets (or Pinterest, etc.), they can see how to sign up immediately.
10. Include social media snippets in your newsletter

If you really want to encourage newsletter subscribers to connect with you on social media, try taking screen shots of good engagement that you’ve had on social media channels (like Twitter and Facebook) and use the Microsoft Snipping Tool, or something like Snagit, to take a picture of some of those great messages and include them in your newsletter. This works particularly well if you pair it with a call to action, as call to action success rates are greatly increased if you pair them with a testimonial.

11. Put email and social media marketing plans on a common calendar, and create themes of content on all channels

The smart thing to do is to use your marketing emails (like your newsletter) and your social media updates to reinforce each other by running common themes through all channels. All this means is that you talk about related things on all your social media accounts and emails, during a set time period, e.g. your blog has a how-to article about your theme, on Facebook you post some client examples of how you’ve helped people do that thing, and on Twitter you post a daily fact about that topic.

Are you already combining your email marketing and social media marketing efforts and experiencing great results? If so, tell us what you’ve done in the comments below.

Want to start using the combined power of email and social media in your business to bring in new customers? Come to one of our free training sessions in Glasgow, Bristol, or Leeds.