It’s an overused phrase, but “joined-up thinking” should be a key element in any marketing strategy.
And as newsletters and social media accounts are perfect marketing partners, you can squeeze the maximum value from your well-crafted emails by making full use of your social media profiles.
Here are 12 ideas on amplifying your newsletter reach on your social networks:
1) Use your newsletter to promote your social media accounts. For instance, The Gillispie School in La Jolla, CA. uses “media spotlights” in the left side column of their newsletter that links to specific posts on their social media sites.
2) In your newsletter, include links with text like: ‘Share on Facebook,’ ‘Tweet this,’ ‘Share on LinkedIn’. The use of verbs is a great encouragement for people to do exactly what you’re asking them to. To find out how to create the share links, read Sharing email content on social media
3) Have a link to your sign-up page on the newsletter itself (it’s good to have this anyway, as if it’s forwarded to a friend it’s easy for the recipient to subscribe if they like the look of the content).
4) Then choose some top tips or a juicy piece of teaser text from your email and post on Facebook or Twitter. Alongside this offer a link to the web-based version so that your followers can read it for themselves, and sign up to your emails if they like it.
5) Include linked social media logos below your email content so that readers can keep in touch on social media as well as by email. RedCappi make that easy by dragging and dropping the images straight into your email. All the usual logos are there plus Instagram, Tumblr and more.
6) Pin images from your newsletter on Pinterest and include a link to the web-based version of your email.
7) Use clicktotweet links in your newsletter copy so that readers can easily tweet interesting snippets of information. All that’s needed to generate the link that you’ll use in the newsletter is a message of less than 140 characters and a link to your website.
9) Copy a big chunk of text of the email into Facebook and include a link to your sign-up form. Remember, you have an enormous 63,206 characters to play with on Facebook so you can include quite a lot of content.
10) Offer an email-only discount, deal or exclusive content in your next newsletter. Before it’s sent, tweet or post about the exciting news and offer a link to your sign-up page. In that way, you’ll be offering new subscribers an incentive to sign up, and your usual recipients will receive the offer too.
11) With the number of emails we all receive, it’s easy to miss one. So tweet a reminder that it’s in their inbox, or mention it in Facebook to jog their memories. This is even more useful now that Google have added tabs to Googlemail to manage promotional v social and personal emails.
12) Run a competition on Facebook to gain more email subscribers. Software like ShortStack will help you do this. Here’s a very detailed article on the subject of Facebook competitions
13) Discuss your latest newsletter on a post on your Facebook page, encouraging your followers to contribute to the conversation. Then have a mention of that discussion in your next newsletter (and link to the post) so that your followers feel they’re being listened to and nonfollowers get to know you have a Facebook page.
Summary
Newsletters are an excellent way to get your new content out to an interested audience, but pushing it out to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn Pinterest and the like will give it a chance of being seen by a much bigger audience. And of course, using social media to encourage sign-ups is a must.
Have you any ingenious ideas for extending the reach of your email newsletters? Let us know in the comments below.