Email marketing is a great way to engage customers and prospects, as well as build brand awareness. Another lesser-known benefit of email marketing? Using it to drive traffic to your social media profiles. An astounding eighty-three percent of B2B marketers use email newsletters for content marketing purposes, according to the Content Marketing Institute, so if you’re not using it to drive traffic to your social media accounts, you’re missing out.
Don’t be afraid to promote your social media channels in your emails. You can include buttons that link to your social profiles at the bottom of every email, and send some emails for the sole purpose of promoting your channels. When you do so, be sure to mention why people should follow you on social media. This can be to get exclusive content, updated industry information, special discounts and promotions, or anything else you offer through social media channels. You can also encourage your readers to share a web-based version of your email newsletters on their social media accounts.
Ready to gain followers for your social media channels through your email marketing campaigns? Here are some tips to help make sure you’re effective:
Use Clear CTAs
Having clear call-to-actions will help increase your click-through rates. Whether you want people to click on a link to your blog post or a link to one of your social media profiles, make sure that the CTA is direct and visible. Using buttons is a great way to create clear CTAs.
Use Engaging Media
Another way to increase your click-through rate is by using engaging media. Images and videos are great places to start. Including a video screenshot that links to a video on your blog, YouTube channel, or on one of your other social media channels can quickly increase engagement and boost your email CTR by up to 200 percent or more. You might include links to videos that showcase company culture, cool manufacturing processes, your company’s backstory, or your team volunteering in the community. GIFs, memes, and cartoons are other forms of interactive content to consider.
If humor is a good fit for your organization, don’t be afraid to use it in images, content, and videos that drive traffic to your social media sites. In this article from HubSpot, Mike Volpe explains how a clever email campaign with a humorous video resulted in a CTR that was 583 percent higher than the industry average. And in this article, you can learn about the wide variety of videos you could use in social media marketing, including “explainer videos” that describe your products or services.
Use Your Best Content
If you want to promote your blog, YouTube channel, or social media account in your emails, make sure to include only your best content. Sending out a lot of mediocre blog post emails can lead to fewer conversions. Quality will be more effective than quantity here. You may read best practices pieces that say you should send out your email marketing “X” amount of times per week or month, but if you don’t have enough content to support that frequency, remember quality over quantity.
Send at the Right Times
Send your emails at times when your subscribers are most responsive and have the most time to read your newsletters or the blog posts that you link to. According to CoSchedule, which analyzed 14 different studies about the best time to send emails, the curated results showed the top times of the day to send emails are as follows (in the following order):
- 10 AM: People checking their email at the beginning of the work day
- 8 PM: People checking their email before bed
- 2 PM: People looking for distractions while lazing at work after lunch
- 6 AM: People checking their email first thing in the morning
Choose the time zone for the majority of your readers or segment geographically and send based on each group’s time zones.
The best days of the week to send emails are as follows (also listed in order):
- Tuesday
- Wednesday
- Thursday
Although there is great consensus among the resources that Tuesdays at 10 a.m. is the prime option, the caveat is your industry and business might have different results. The only way to truly know the best times and days for sending emails will be testing to see what works for you.
Make Your Emails Easy to Read
Always make sure that your emails are easy to read. This starts with making sure that both your emails and the posts that they link to are mobile responsive. You should also break up large blocks of text with white space and/or images. And in most cases – although this does depend on the audience – emails should use an informal and friendly voice. People open emails when it sounds like it would be from someone they know, not someone trying to sell them something.
Verify Your Emails
This sounds obvious, but if you’re trying to drive traffic to your blog and website through your email campaigns, you need to ensure your emails are getting delivered in the first place. And a surprising amount of businesses are still not verifying their emails. Always verify email addresses before importing them in your CRM or other data management system. This will help ensure that fake email addresses, misspelled addresses, and spam traps don’t end up on your email marketing list, and then get included in your email marketing campaigns. When you have junk emails included in your email campaigns, that can negatively impact your sender reputation and send your emails directly to spam folders.
Thankfully, there’s BriteVerify from Validity. Our email verification API can be added in minutes anywhere you collect customer data – from web lead forms on landing pages to Point-of-Sale (POS) systems (POS). The BriteVerify API provides real-time verification that the email addresses you collect are valid and deliverable. You can also clean existing email marketing lists with our BriteVerify email verification service. Simply drag and drop your email list into the window or import it from your Email Service Provider (ESP), and we’ll identify which emails are valid, invalid, or risky. After verification is completed, you can download your list, or automatically unsubscribe invalid and risky emails from your campaigns. Easy as that!
To learn more about starting an email verification program, visit the BriteVerify website.