Tink Taylor (pictured) explores mixing social media with email.

Social media is the latest buzzword in the marketing industry with everyone looking to jump on the bandwagon. In fact, in marketing circles, rarely a day goes by when the media isn’t championing a new social network or big-brand social media case study.

There can be no doubt that social media provides a fantastic opportunity for marketers. We are all spending an increasing amount of time reading blogs and participating on social networks. Recent research from Nielsen, for example, shows that globally, we spent 82 per cent more time on social networks like Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook, in December 2009, than we did at the same time a year before.

This increased interest offers great potential for marketers: by tapping into social communities you are geared up to reach a wide, new audience through one of the most effective marketing tools – peer recommendations.

But all this buzz and hysteria has led some to suggest that the rise of social media spells the beginning of the end for disciplines like email marketing. Moves by social networks like Facebook to introduce its own internal messaging and communication platform adds credibility to these claims.

The frequent reports about email’s demise as a platform, and therefore as a marketing discipline, are simply misguided. Despite the rise of social media and the likes of Google Wave and Facebook Mail going for its crown, email as we know it is here to stay.

There is research to support this claim, too. It won’t come as any surprise to note that Internet usage as a whole is increasing at record levels. According to the UK Online Measurement company (UKOM), the average UK Internet user now spends 22 hours and 15 minutes on the web each month. 

However, when we delve into the statistics around what users actually do online, there are surprises. While time spent on social networks has increased in the last year to account for nearly a quarter of all time spent online, the use of instant messaging has fallen. 

Email is another (perhaps surprising to some) winner and, according to the research, email now accounts for 7.2 per cent of time spent online, compared to 6.5 per cent three years ago.

So, with email and social networking sitting at the top of the most common activities performed online, it makes sense for marketers to focus their efforts on these two areas. But they don’t have to exist in isolation. Social media works best when it is integrated with other forms of marketing, and email is a natural bedfellow. 

Email marketers are used to the challenges that social media throws up: for example, creating engaging content or targeting offers to certain segments or target audiences. Email is in many ways the precursor to social media activity. It is a social medium after all, and it is also very dynamic and open. 

A match made in heaven

Obviously, this ‘openness’ of email marketing has also caused problems with the rise of spam. But email clients are reaching new levels of sophistication, increasing the effectiveness of spam filters and adding new features and functionality. Look at Microsoft, for example, and its recent development of the Hotmail client, bringing in social media integration and a range of new features and functionality that takes the inbox to the next level.

There are, therefore, clear and inbuilt links that can be forged between social media and email marketing. And yet, too many email marketers are ignoring this potential. Our Hitting the Mark benchmark study, recently released, revealed that only 17 per cent of email campaigns studied among top retailers included any ‘share on social network’ links, and only four of the retailers included a link to their blog in the email content.

The truth is that integrating social media into email campaigns isn’t rocket science – it’s easy and cost-effective and brings incredible benefits as a result.

Email marketing is all about building, growing and maintaining relationships with your recipients and this mirrors very closely the aims and ambitions of much social media activity. 

Combining the two, you can create better, more long-term relationships by using both channels to connect and engage with your recipients more regularly.

Email marketing provides you with a fantastic way to tap into your recipients’ social networks, but it won’t happen on its own. 

Here are my top tips on how to better integrate social media with email:

• Add sharing links – ‘Share this’ buttons have become common on most web content, so make sure you add them to your emails, too! They allow readers to quickly and easily share material they find interesting with their social circle. A recent study by Marketing Sherpa found that including sharing buttons on an email marketing message produced a 25 per cent boost in reader interaction and a surge in inbound traffic from social networks.
• Make sure your email content is relevant and targeted – However, your recipients are only going to share your email with their like-minded social connections if the content is targeted and relevant to them. This means that segmenting your recipient lists to reach the right person with the right message becomes even more important.
• Publicise your newsletter to social communities – When you send out your email newsletter, post the link to the web version on your Linkedin, Twitter or Facebook account. This will encourage your followers to read the message and, if you have a prominent ‘subscribe’ link in the email itself, they might even sign up.
• Add a ‘follow us on Twitter’ link – As well as giving recipients the option to share newsletter content, make sure you publicise your social network accounts so that recipients that aren’t following you on Twitter, for example, can have the option to add you. This will help you deepen the relationship and will make it more likely that they will share future content with their network.
• Encourage social media interactions – Where possible, try to encourage recipients to take actions on social networks. For example, could you use your email message to invite feedback on your latest product via Twitter or on Facebook? Or why not encourage your customers to submit pictures of them using your products on Flickr?

As previously stated, these ideas aren’t revolutionary and will only take a very short amount of time to implement. But, they are important steps forward in unifying your social media and email marketing activities.

Measurement of activities

The last point to make is regarding the measurement of your integrated activities. Any marketing activity you take part in needs to be measurable against solid business goals. Digital marketers are at an advantage here as so much of digital marketing is easy to measure and track. Email marketers know this well, too and are used to using email platforms to track, improve and report on their email campaigns.

The same is true of social media. Not only can you track whether recipients have clicked on social media links in your emails much as you would any click-through, you can also use analytics packages to track whether your integrated social media and email marketing activities are driving traffic to your website that actually converts.

Getting involved

Many businesses I speak to know they should be getting involved with social media, but just don’t know where to start. 

Viewing social media as a siloed activity is always going to make it very difficult to get to grips with. But, by integrating social media with a proven discipline like email, you can not only take the small steps into this new territory with confidence, you can also increase and improve the effects of your digital marketing as a whole.

Tink Taylor is managing director, dotMailer.