Online marketing is an industry that evolves with amazing speed. While keeping up with all the latest trends is important, tried-and-true techniques should not be neglected. An effective marketing campaign speaks to potential customers across a wide range of different media. Social media marketing is an excellent way to reach a large audience, but combining it with email marketing is a great way to get better results.
Make Marketing Personal
As noted above, social media marketing is a wholesale way of reaching out to customers. There is only so much specialization that can be done. In contrast to social media messages, marketing emails can be highly customized to reflect the precise interests of individual recipients. Customers should always be presented with the opportunity to sign up for emails when they visit social media sites. With a little care, email messages can be fine-tuned based on customer data to maximize their effectiveness. Setting up a series of autoresponders allows a marketer to present the most compelling possible message to the individual customer. This process is not necessarily time-consuming and a well-managed email campaign need not take up much time at all.
Use The Right Tools
Of course, the efficiency of any given email campaign will depend on the tools used to design and manage it. While free tools are sufficient for basic marketing work, serious marketers typically invest in a more full-featured software suite. Redcappi is a fine example of a robust marketing platform that takes a lot of the drudgery out of email marketing. Good marketing software provides templates that make it easy to craft professional-looking emails. It also makes scheduling a breeze. Suites like Redcappi also allow users to discriminate carefully between different groups of recipients, ensuring that the right messages land in the right inboxes.
Track Results
An effective email marketing push requires more than just outbound messages. Marketers need to know what impact their work is having. Tracking sales that come directly from email marketing is a great way to get a general idea about a given campaign’s return on investment (ROI), but there’s much more data available for savvy marketers to look at. A good software suite is extremely helpful for tracking results as well as managing campaigns. Proper marketing software seamlessly integrates tracking features (e.g. tracking codes) and logs tons of useful statistics regarding every message sent. This gives marketers a detailed view of exactly what works and what does not.
Never Stop Innovating
Though a strong email marketing campaign can be run with minimal oversight (especially with the help of good automation), smart marketers are not content to rest on their laurels. All of the data and feedback gathered in the course of a marketing push can be used to fine-tune the current campaign, resolve problematic issues, and plan even more effective campaigns in the future. It is relatively easy to experiment with different marketing approaches as long as the marketer keeps track of exactly what messages are going out. Different marketing messages can be dispatched to different groups of customers, revealing the relative strengths and weaknesses of each version. In this way, the weaker approaches can be weeded out and the marketer can concentrate on only the most effective techniques. Combining email marketing and social media marketing is a potent way to extend one’s reach and cultivate better results. Where social media messages speak to current and potential customers as a group, email messages single out individuals and present them with the most compelling marketing message possible. Greater integration between these two marketing forms leads to greater awareness of the marketer’s brand, better relationships with customers and more sales. These results make it well worth the effort to incorporate email marketing into social media campaigns. Jonathan Leger has been a successful Internet Marketer for over 11 years. He owns an SEO Tools suite at KeywordCanine.com