How to Craft Social Media Email Marketing Campaigns Like a Professional

Email and social media marketing are the two most powerful digital marketing channels today. With the right strategies, they can help grow brand awareness, build a loyal audience, and increase revenue sustainably.

On their own, social media and email marketing have their share of advantages and limitations. But combined, they can supercharge your digital marketing efforts by growing your email lists, increasing engagement, building trust, and establishing brand consistency.

In this article, we will discuss the pros and cons of email and social media channels individually, help you understand the perks of multi-channel marketing, and share the best strategies for aligning your social media and email marketing efforts for maximum impact.

Social media and email are fundamentally different in approach and effect.

Social media engages the audience through interactive campaigns. Content creators foster interactions and encourage people to participate in discussions. Social platforms have interactive buttons such as like, share, and subscribe, encouraging people to join conversations and keep the momentum going with minimal creator input.

So, it’s hardly surprising that social media offers the ideal opportunity to quickly reach new audiences and potentially go viral in the process.

Email, on the other hand, is a direct and personalized communication channel suitable for cultivating one-on-one relationships. On the surface, it may seem unimpressive, especially when compared to social media. However, upon closer inspection, you begin to notice the innate qualities that make email marketing the most powerful business communication channel today.

Let’s explore the perks and limitations of social media and email marketing individually before learning about their combined benefits.

In the last decade, social media has become an integral part of our daily lives. Couple that with the fact that every second, eleven people use a new social platform for the first time, and it’s hard to miss the global outreach capabilities of social channels.

Social media is an excellent platform for reaching a large number of people quickly. Leverage this opportunity with smart strategies and you can build brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, and generate revenue.

Vast outreach makes social media marketing perfect for targeting top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) customers. Since social messages are available to everyone, you can use it to reach a wider demographic.

Since social media posts are available to everyone, it’s difficult to deliver targeted messages. While you can target specific demographics to a certain extent with paid ads, people outside your target audience can still see your message. Hence, there is no scope for launching personalized campaigns.

Benefits of Email Marketing

Email marketing, on the other hand, is a direct communication channel ideal for one-on-one conversations. This makes email campaigns suitable for targeting customers at different stages of the buyer’s journey.

You can use emails to:

introduce readers to your brand, products, or services
build and nurture relationships
close deals and convert prospects to paying customers
ask for customer feedback or testimonials

With the help of email list segmentation and campaign automation, you can control the series of emails that each subscriber receives at different stages of their buyer’s journey. This is crucial for delivering personalized messages to your contacts at the right time. And as every experienced marketer will tell you, timing makes all the difference between success and failure.

Personalized emails help build brand loyalty and increase conversion rates. According to data, email marketing influences 59% of the recipients’ purchase or sign-up decisions, compared to social media marketing’s 45% success rate.

While emails can encourage customers at any stage of the buyer’s journey, they are most effective in influencing buyers in the middle- (MOFU) to bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) stage in the sales funnel.

Shortcomings of Email Marketing

For starters, the direct response nature makes it unethical to send marketing emails without consent. Unsolicited marketing correspondence increases spam complaints and reduces open, conversion, and click-through rates.

Prolonged spamming can hinder your IP sender score, which in turn reduces email deliverability and damages your brand reputation. To learn more about email sending best practices, click here.

While email and social media are powerful marketing channels individually, a unified strategy for multiple platforms can amplify outreach, create new customers, and increase revenue. Here are five reasons why combining email and social media is a brilliant marketing strategy for all businesses, big or small:

Increase Brand Awareness

While email marketing is ideal for sending targeted messages to existing customers, nothing trumps social media platforms when it comes to global outreach. So, staying active on multiple channels will help you engage with a broader audience. With the help of social media and email marketing, you boost your chances of being heard.

Expand Your Audience Base

Growing an email list organically takes a lot of patience. And while there are no shortcuts to success, agile strategies can streamline your marketing efforts.

For example, if you’re having trouble expanding your subscriber list, launch a social media campaign letting the audience know you’re offering a bunch of valuable content through email. Provide a sneak peek of what you will offer in your marketing emails (additional discounts, limited-period coupons, priority access to Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, etc.)

Boost Your Marketing Potential

By reaching out to potential customers everywhere on the World Wide Web, you’re increasing your chances of being noticed compared to businesses relying solely on email marketing.

For example, encourage social media followers to share your posts with people they know and add a link to your main landing page in the content.

Conversely, launch an email campaign promoting your social media profiles and ask subscribers to follow you on social channels.

Give People More Options to Connect with Your Business

Your loyal customers might have different routines, tastes, schedules, and lifestyles. Some might actively respond to email notifications, while others might prefer social media posts.

By combining email and social media marketing, you give people more options to connect with you. The goal is to meet your audience where they’re located instead of where you want to reach them.

Create Personalized Experiences

Learning more about your audience will help you create tailored experiences, increasing your chances of converting prospective customers into paying customers. And what better tool for gathering real-time data than social media?

Collect feedback from your social media followers in the comments, study how they perceive your brand, listen to what the audience is saying, create polls to see what they want, and use this information to send personalized emails.

Now that you understand why you need to combine social media and email marketing, let’s dive straight into how to align your email and social strategies.

Both social media and email marketing rely on content to persuade readers to perform your desired action. So, reusing the same content for emails and social media posts saves resources and maintains brand consistency.

For example, you can repurpose a social media infographic for a newsletter or convert an email sales copy into a series of social media ads. You can also split a blog post into podcasts or turn it into a video series for YouTube. You can then promote the videos or podcasts throughout your social channels using the short video format (reels and stories on Instagram, TikTok videos, YouTube Shorts, etc.).

Create a content calendar to streamline your posting schedule on multiple platforms. You don’t necessarily have to turn every blog post into a video or infographic into a newsletter. The goal is to schedule your email marketing campaign with social media posts.

Simultaneously posting on different marketing channels helps maintain brand consistency and streamline the content strategy. This is especially useful for small businesses with limited manpower and resources.

Organic reach is pretty limited on social media platforms. Hence, the only way to drive traffic to your posts is through paid advertisements.

Email marketing, on the other hand, is pretty affordable. Test your marketing content via email and monitor the results. Once you have an effective copy with proven conversion rates, run it via social media ads.

This is a much cheaper alternative to testing ad copies on social media with similar results.

A few social media platforms, like Facebook and X, have built-in tools to collect email addresses from their audiences. This helps grow your email list organically through social channels.

On other platforms, like Instagram for example, you can add the link to your email sign-up form in the bio and ask viewers to sign up for your newsletters. Remember to offer something valuable, like we discussed earlier, to motivate people to share their email addresses.

Adding social CTAs to your email marketing campaign is one of the least intrusive methods of expanding your social media following. Add CTA icons to your email signature and write persuasive copy asking subscribers to follow you on social media. And don’t forget to offer exclusive deals, like we’ve mentioned before.

Add persuasive CTAs to all your social media posts and accounts, encouraging viewers to sign up for your email newsletters. Leverage the vast outreach of social media to grow your email lists organically.

Social media is an excellent platform for collecting feedback from past clients. Use this opportunity to share what customers say about you with the target audience.

People will often leave reviews on your profile, post comments, and rate your services on third-party platforms, such as TripAdvisor. Highlight the positive experiences via an email marketing campaign or social media posts with viewers and subscribers. This content is far more valuable than all your sales pitches.

Your customers are the biggest advocates for your business. Leverage this opportunity to share user-generated content with your audience.

For example, if you own a clothing business, ask customers to post pictures of them on social media wearing the dress that they bought from you, along with a specific hashtag. You can launch an email campaign sharing these images and asking subscribers to browse your products.

You can also offer a discount coupon that can be redeemed on the next purchase within six months to encourage customers to share their feedback and increase your chances of generating a repeat sale.

Fear of missing out (FOMO) is a major psychological force driving our most insane decisions. Experienced marketers utilize the power of anxiety to influence customers’ purchase decisions.

For example, you can create an exclusive group on Facebook or WhatsApp for your most active followers or email subscribers. You can invite all your prospects to make them feel special or specify that only people who refer their friends are eligible to join the group.

Restricted entry improves content quality, reduces spam, and keeps the audience interested in your offers. Hence, creating a VIP group increases customer engagement and organic reach.

Build Brand Awareness, Drive Website Traffic, and Increase Engagement with an Agile Multi-channel Marketing Strategy

Now that you’re familiar with the benefits of aligning your email and social media strategies, it’s time to implement what you’ve learned. Don’t be afraid of failing or making mistakes, as that is a part of the learning process.

And if you need help combining your email and social media strategies, feel free to book a discovery call to learn how our experts can streamline your digital marketing efforts.