Consumers are constantly connected to technology through different channels. They open emails in the morning, browse through Facebook in their spare time or use their desktop to find a new t-shirt.
This all-day, anywhere access to the online world has shaped the way consumers shop online. Someone can find an interesting store on social media and then go to make a purchase after opening a sale email.
The cross-device, cross-channel shopping trend is pushing eCommerce businesses to have a ubiquitous presence online; however, many businesses are failing to do one of the most important things: integration.
By properly combining all online presence, businesses can get a more cohesive message and overall brand image that can strengthen their appeal to the public.
Often overlooked as a combination, social media and email marketing play a key role in overall marketing integration. Together, these channels can help you target and nurture potential customers throughout their buying journey.
In this article, we’ll explore the benefits of combining social media and email marketing to strengthen your eCommerce marketing.
To get the most of this strategy, it’s necessary to think about the customer journey. You probably have a decent list of emails in your database, but all of those emails are not at the same stage in their customer journey.
Some of them may be recurring customers, others might have signed up for a newsletter but have never bought any products, or maybe other contacts haven’t purchased in a while.
Knowing what stage your contacts are in will allow you to segment your list and tailor your message accordingly. The idea is to target these segmented lists on social media with specific ads according to the stage that they are in.
For example, let’s say that John hasn’t made a purchase in a couple of months. We can encourage him to come back to make a purchase by showing him an ad on Facebook that says something like: “Haven’t heard from you in a while—come back and get 15% off”! At the same time, we can send him an email that has a different copy but the same idea.
This very targeted social media and email combination creates a seamless and powerful marketing strategy. You get to reach the same customer multiple times, through different platforms, which increases your chances of conversion. To execute this tactic, you need to go to Facebook and create a Custom Audience. Start at your ads manager and click on “Audiences”:
Then, click on Create Audience> Custom Audience
Select Customer File and upload your contacts or import them from MailChimp.
Do the same thing for each of your segments and name the audience accordingly. In addition, experiment with Lookalike Audiences to increase your reach. You can implement a similar process for Twitter. Once your campaigns are set up, integrate all your efforts with Springbot, a marketing platform used to easily measure all your efforts in one place.
At this point, you should have a better idea of why social media and email can power up your marketing efforts, but let’s dive a little further. As we’ve mentioned earlier, it’s easy to grab an email list of contacts and retarget them on social media, but what about the other way around?
Unfortunately, no major social media channel offers a way to download followers’ information, so you’ll have to get it in a conventional manner. Getting your followers’ emails will allow you to increase your email database to send promotional and informational emails to increase conversions or keep your current customers engaged.
One of the things you can do capture your followers’ emails is to add a signup tab on your Facebook page. This is a designated area to encourage your Facebook followers to sign up for your newsletter.
Many newsletter platforms such as MailChimp offer an easy-to-use integration so you can get your signup tab done quickly. The tab looks like the one below:
Preferably, add an incentive to encourage your followers to sign up to your newsletter. Discounts or special promotions work really well. Whatever incentive you use, make sure you have an automated email set up to welcome new subscribers.
Taking a list of email contacts and uploading it to social media is easy, but it’s not always effective. Not all your email subscribers will use the same email they subscribed to your newsletter to log in for social media.
Therefore, it’s always a good idea to cross-promote your social media in all your emails to make sure your subscribers are also following you on social media.
This cross-promotion can be done in multiple ways. The easiest one is to add social media links to all your emails. These links shouldn’t be buried at the bottom of your email; they should be prominent at the top of all your newsletters.
Another way to encourage your subscribers to follow your brand on social media is to provide an incentive for following. For example, offer a 15% off discount to all email subscribers that also follow you on social media.
As technology advances, we can only expect customer behaviors to change as well. Shopping is becoming faster and simpler, which is setting a standard in the eCommerce industry.
As smart business owners, we have to stay on the lookout for new trends in our industry and be flexible enough to make enhancements in our processes as necessary. Always remember to keep a cohesive and seamless shopping experience by integrating all of your marketing efforts properly.
Let us know in the comment section below how you connect the email and social media presence of your brand.
