Combining the power of email and social media.

Last week I attended a Dotmailer seminar on how to optimise your online reach by combining the power of email and social media.

Here are my 5 key takeaways from the session:

1.When creating emails always give the recipient the opportunity to share the content to their social media. Make it easy for them by prepopulating the message. And always include your social media profile handle/name so that the content is attributed to you

2. Research suggests that on average access to exclusive content sees a much higher engagement rate than simple money-off offers. This may not be the case for all industries and businesses, but it’s certainly worth a try to see what works best for your audience.

3. When you are executing marketing messaging across a number of channels, including social and email, always make sure you use consistent language. This mean that your customers that are connected with you through a number of channels receive a consistent message. And that for anyone else who sees one or two elements, more content can always be easily found.

4. Not all your social media followers will be email subscribers and vice versa. Take the opportunity to try and connect with your customers across multiple platforms to strengthen relationships and build up a responsive following.

5. Take time to identify relevant social influencers. It’s not enough to simply look at how many followers or fans someone has. You need to understand how much those followers engage with that person/profile. There are a number of tools available that will do a lot of the work for you, including an effective tool called Klout. Klout takes signals from a range of social networks to deliver up a ‘Klout Score’, which is a number between 1-100 that represents influence. The more influential, the higher the Klout Score. Klout can also be used as a starting point to identify influencers in your industry or field of interest.