Best Practices for Integrating Social and Email
Email marketing providers are starting to catch on to the idea that integrating social media in anyway possible will make their platform seem more appealing to customers. There are two ways social media is generally being integrated. First is an automatic way to publish new email campaigns to your Facebook and Twitter profiles. Second is allowing email recipients to share the web version of the email with their own social networks with social sharing features. Here I would like to explore both of these ideas in terms of how this would work into an online marketing strategy.
Traditionally an online content strategy that encompasses both email and social would clearly want to separate the content between the two. Most marketers feel that email should have its own content so as to ensure that we give an incentive for the audience to opt-in to an email list. If each email campaign is automatically shared to social media profiles the consumer has no incentive to subscribe to the email list.
As most of us know social media is a more fluid medium where depending on the follow of connections your target user has and how often they login to the platform your content is unlikely to reach everyone. On Facebook this is further complicated by EdgeRank as publishers have to maintain consistent high engagement to ensure content appears in the news feed of our audience. Contrast that with email where, baring some delivery factors to get past SPAM filters, our content lands in an inbox of our user where they will have the opportunity to read it if they chose. Because of these differences we tend to favor a variety, of high volume, interactive, bite-size content on social where on email we tend to focus on deeper, higher value, and more relevant content that is exclusive to our highest value subscriber. This comes from the deeper commitment to deliver the absolute best quality content to users who trust us with their email inbox.
It would seem to me, and I think most marketers agree that it makes the most sense to segregate the social content from the email content and NOT publish each email campaign to our social media profiles. That said I don’t see as much harm in allowing or even encouraging recipients to share the email campaign with their own online networks if they feel inclined. Does that sound like a double standard?
What are your thoughts?
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