If you haven’t integrated social media into your e-mails and vice versa, you’re missing out. Give your subscribers the ability to share email content with their followers, and you stand to potentially grow your mailing list, increase ROI, raise brand awareness, and reach new markets and subscribers.

In fact, a Marketing Sherpa study found that 42% of daily social media users check their email four times a day or more, compared to just 27% of non-social media users.

Going “social” in email can be as easy as adding buttons into your template to invite subscribers to join or “Follow” on social sites.

Sailthru makes it easy to allow subscribers to share content as well. Use the public_share or social_share functions in your campaign with options to “Like” or “Share”.

Public_share posts the entire newsletter, while social_share allows users to post or like a specific article:
<a href=“{ {public_share('fblike')}}”>Like this on Facebook</a>
<a href=“{{social_share('fbshare', 'http://blog.sailthru.com/specific_article/')}}”>Share on Facebook</a>

Or, encourage your readers to forward your newsletter to a friend by including an easy e-mail forward button. Just drop in Sailthru’s zephyr syntax {forward_url} to your campaign, and create a template named “forward”.

Share your campaign on social sites by posting a link to the Web-based version of your e-newsletter. And remember to include {view_url} in your template so readers can click to view it online, too.

Let users sign up for your email list on your Facebook page via a signup box and use Twitter to redirect users to a signup webpage, which can be easily hosted on Sailthru.

Finally, create a Facebook wall post that encourages fans to opt-in to your email list. Consider an email promotion to only your most engaged users to boost their awareness of your Facebook page. Offer incentives such as discounts or advance notice of sales for subscribers who choose to follow your social media page. Offer rewards or discounts for those who opt-in to your campaign via a form on your page or blog.

Remember that quality content is the key to engaging your readers. Readers will be inspired to share content for a few reasons. Incentives such as contest winnings or discounts are motivation. Sharing items of value or significant savings opportunities provide the subscriber with feelings of validation in their social circle. But the most influential reason to post is quality content. Sharing dynamic content helps subscribers feel they are contributing to their social circle and can also integrate them with others. So be creative, relevant, and engaging across all platforms. Social media is based on sharing, not advertising.

1 – Tweet and post on Facebook each time your newsletter is sent out and link to the subscribe page.

2 – Tweet and post on Facebook, asking them to add you to their safe senders list (credit to Laura Wise for this one). Link to a post with step-by-step on how to add someone to the safe senders list.

3 – Tweet and post on Facebook a link to the online version of the latest newsletter and invite people to demo it.

4 – Tweet about the content in each newsletter: “Find out how you can save 20% in this week’s newsletter!”

5 – Build up some excitement by tweeting and posting on Facebook the day before the newsletter comes out with some teasers and subscribe link.

You’re only limited by your own imagination. Both Facebook and Twitter lend themselves very well to this kind of cross-promotion. It’s a two-way world now, so don’t be afraid to involve people in the process by interacting with them directly and get their input.

Using Twitter effectively for customer service is much like being in a check out line at the local store and overhearing two people loudly talking about a negative experience with your company. If you’re smart and you care about your brand, you will step up, introduce yourself and offer them your business card, inviting them to contact you so that you can clear up any misunderstandings. Aside from the sincere desire to make it right, you are also doing some PR damage control by making sure other people in that line are aware that you do care about customer service.

The study also found that a whopping 83% of respondents reported that just getting a response from the brand involved and knowing they were listening was a big positive — some even said they loved the fact that they got a response. No surprise there! Real or not, there’s a feeling of being directly connected to a brand when you interact with them on Twitter — kind of like sitting down for a mint julep with Colonel Sanders (if he was still with us).

The world has changed and if you are not effectively using Twitter and other social channels to engage and interact with your customers, you are in danger of being irrelevant to them. Customers want to connect with brands on social media and after decades of fretting about how to yank people into a store or get them to buy products or services, one would think the new reality of pull marketing would have companies falling over each other to leverage it. It simply does not make sense to ignore the customer service  power of social channels such as Twitter.

If you are worried about using Twitter, here are five things you should do before responding to a negative tweet.

Also, read this post about how you can be more creative with your content sharing via Twitter.

We all try to write effective subject lines which are strong enough to stand on their own on multiple channels, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t mix it up. I like to tweet a new post early in the morning before the office rush has started up and then I will tweet about the same post later in the afternoon — of course, I rewrite the tweet. A good subject line is always a good place to start, but give it a little thought and try to use some creativity with your tweets.

Many voices
There are many “voices” you can use for a tweet. Those voices dictate how the tweet is written, the tone. Remember your old drama classes and try on some different character voices. Here are three examples for inspiration where I’ve allowed for about 20 characters extra, assuming one of the URL shortening services (character counts vary by service) is being employed and I’ve not allowed for # tags. Whenever possible I try to work hash tag words into the body of the tweet.

The reaction:
Wow! Everyone is talking about our latest post on tweet lengths! We’d love to hear your thoughts too!

The question:
Do you have a preference against email marketing preference centers? We do! We can do better! Here’s how!

The ring announcer:
Ding! Ding! Our CEO takes off the gloves about the subject of email list buying & doesn’t pull any of his punches!

Content elements
Your content has a lot more to it than a snappy headline. Think of all you have to work with:

• Quotes
• Stats
• Snippets
• Comments/Reactions
• Retweets of other comments/tweets

The point here is that you can be creative and have a lot of fun with your tweets. Just give it some thought, use a little creativity and above all else, have some fun with it!

I know I’ve left out some classic games! There are so many we could use to illustrate email marketing tips. I could and just might post more of these.

What examples would you add?

Follow the Leader
While you should definitely be observing what others are doing with email marketing, just don’t follow along blindly mimicking. Try something different, be original and trust your gut along with your metrics.

Mother May I?
If mother didn’t opt-in to your email marketing list, than you don’t have permission to send her email…game over.

Hide-and-Seek
Don’t hide calls-to-action by sending people to generic pages from your newsletter! Integrate each email marketing campaign with optimized landing pages. Make it clear what you want people to do and easy for them to find what they want.

Keep Away
Every email, every tweet, every posting on LinkedIn or Facebook, is an invitation to interact. Today it’s no longer about pushing information out. It’s about initiating interactions with consumers on whatever channel they may choose at any time.

Telephone
You know how badly mangled any message passed along in this game becomes. You should have a solid eCRM solution so that all interactions across all channels feed such things as leads, feedback and other important customer and prospect information to the right people.

Regardless of the channel, those who forget people are the heart of the matter, fail.

Here are five multi-channel marketing truths that apply to all social channels including email marketing:

Communities drive the web
Communities and their desire to communicate gave birth to the web and continue to nurture its exponential growth. Provide a solid foundation with good content and then build on that foundation by providing people the tools (comments, reviews, forums and so on) to share and interact with each other around that content.

Know the people, then the technology
Knowing technology and what it can and can’t do is very important, but knowing your subscribers and what they do and don’t want is even more important. No matter what the channel is, you are still trying to engage a person using it.

Don’t tell me what you can do! Show me what I can do!
I think what people do with your product is a lot more powerful for marketing today than what your product can do – no matter how many special things it does. What’s really engaging is to show me people using the products, share their stories or revues on your website, in your email marketing and via other channels such as Facebook.

Respect my inbox
People opted into your email marketing list to get value and that value comes from your content. If you value your subscribers then respect their inbox and only send content they will value.

Listen
All social media including email (because when two humans interact it’s social) works two ways. If all you are doing is talking and you are not listening, then you are only taking advantage of half the power social media has to offer. Make sure you monitor social and interact and always have an actively monitored “reply” address for your email newsletter.

To relate and effectively interact with people, you have to know what they want. That’s why Sailthru developed solutions such as Horizon. Horizon gathers data on your users’ individual interests, based on activity on your website, mobile device and tablet, all tied to each user’s email address.

Here are five simple things you should be doing to integrate your email marketing and social media:

1 – Make your content something people will want to share. Give them ideas and inspiration that provide real value, and your readers will want to share with others.

2 – Place your social share buttons/links in your newsletter and site with each piece of content you are trying to get people to share. Right after the content seems to be the intuitive place for the links, but you can have them at the top too if it doesn’t impede your design.

3 – Use Twitter and Facebook to pre-promote your newsletter up to a week before it goes out. Tweet topic teasers and even post a short excerpt to Facebook from the upcoming newsletter.

4 – When the newsletter is deployed, tweet some subject lines/topics from it. You can tweet a link to the web version of the newsletter inviting non-subscribers to try it out.

5 – Invite people via social to participate! Ask people to post topic suggestions for your blog and newsletter to your Facebook page.

Again, social media and email marketing integration doesn’t have to be complicated. One thing I really like about integrating social media and email marketing is that anyone can start small and work their way up to the level of integration best suited to their customers. Of course, there is a balance here, first serving your subscribers and second managing your resources optimally. Hopefully the five tips above will help you find the balance you need right now with your email marketing.

So far twitter has avoided the advertising route, but why not do something like the below? At the bare minimum we’d like them to brand their emails and provide some thing more than just an alert. In this example we’ve included some links to other people my new follower follows.

Twitter follow example email

@twitter  We’d love to help send your email! Call us.