One of the most effective ways industrial marketers can use social media for marketing and sales is by integrating social into other marketing tactics.
In particular, e-mail marketing can be easily combined with social media marketing to enhance the effectiveness of each individual effort. Be creating integrated and interactive marketing campaigns, you can increase the chance that buyers will engage with your company.
Here are five tips for how to integrate social media and e-mail marketing.
1. Include social icons in e-mails. Display signals for those social platforms on which your company is active and link them to your company's profiles. Buyers who are active on those same sites may choose to connect with your company, thus giving you another avenue to communicate your marketing messages with them.
2. Include social calls to action in e-mails. In addition to a more direct call to action, you should include a socially oriented call to action requesting that recipients either share your message, connect with your company, or both.
3. Promote e-mail sign-up via social networks. Your social media profiles and activity should include forms and links to allow your connections to sign up for e-mail communication. This will both grow your audience base and and keep them engaged.
4. Promote e-mail marketing on your blog. If you have a corporate blog as part of your website strategy (and you should), discuss the content of your e-mail marketing in one of your posts.
5. Scale promotions based on activity. To help encourage more shares, likes, retweets, etc.; offer multiple tiers of promotions based on the level of social interaction your receive. For example, for prizes, you can name 3 winners for each 1,000 likes, or increase a discount (5%, 10%, 15%) based on the number of retweets.