The Importance of Social Media Monitoring to Your Email Marketing Strategies

Imagine mindlessly scrolling through Facebook and suddenly noticing a familiar logo. Your logo. You check the post and see that a blogger reviewed your product and that several other Facebook users have chimed in on the conversation. What else could you have missed?

From 280-character tweets to Instagram hashtags, social media holds a full array of brand mentions by customers. Today’s businesses are on the lookout for any reference to their business, and they’re doing it so frequently that social media monitoring now has its own sophisticated tools.

? Read Creating a Marketing Strategy that Works: Benefits, Steps, Tools

But where does social media monitoring fit into your business’s overall online marketing scheme? Throughout this post, we’ll show you how it can give your email marketing campaign a much-needed boost (and vice versa).

It’s all in the integration

Let’s forget social media marketing vs. email marketing debate for now. We know they both are very effective, and that they’re actually better when put together. To add to that, they work best when used with other marketing platforms such as content and pay-per-click marketing. Remember that the most successful brands have a holistic view.

We’ve listed a few tips on how you can integrate social media into your email marketing campaign and grow your mailing list:

• Use #customhashtags. With almost all businesses using hashtags these days, you have to come up with a unique (and simple) hashtag to find your followers easily. Use the same hashtag across all platforms, and you’ll get more subscribers in no time. Many brands also use hashtags to announce new products and hold contests.
• Launch targeted ads. When creating an ad, it can be very tempting to click on all audience categories so your brand can reach more people. Try to re-target your ad to Facebook or Twitter users who are most likely to subscribe to your newsletter, and save more funds for another social media campaign.
• Link to your opt-in page. Social media posts should not be too text-heavy, so businesses can have an opportunity to link the post to their website. For example, use an offer or a discount to attract social media users to your opt-in page.

Here’s how TunnelBear used Twitter to engage active subscribers:

Data crunching with ease

Once you’ve successfully integrated your social media networks with your mailing list, you’ll want to find out whether it has significantly improved brand awareness and customer engagement. You’ll also want to know the number of users who choose to engage with you on social media alone.

Social media monitoring can also help a business get to know their online audience better, understand what types of campaigns drive them to join a mailing list, and see how they move from being subscribers to customers and finally, to advocates. 

For example, the dashboard below shows the number of likes and forwards a newsletter received. 

Using the right tools, a business owner can also see engagements from non-subscribers, or those who merely saw the promotion because their Facebook friend shared it on their Timeline. Here are a few other things that social media monitoring can help your business with:

• Search history. What search terms are being used whenever your brand is mentioned? Are customers curious about other uses for your product? A good monitoring tool can help you see these types of engagements in real-time. 

Tip for your next email marketing campaign: Try to address top search queries in your email content. Tweet about it and include a subscribe button.

• Who’s who. Many monitoring tools in the market also offer a breakdown of your most influential followers and top fans. This way, you can decide to re-target your next campaign around them and their own followers.

Tip for your next email marketing campaign: Recognize these influencers and top fans in your email (with their permission). Ask them to post about being featured in your newsletter and request them to link to your opt-in page.

• Top content. Maybe you’re planning to post another promotion on social media. Monitoring tools can list your posts with the most engagements and provide hacks on what types of content to share and when to share them.

Tip for your next email marketing campaign: In your email content, add a section on your trending posts on Youtube, Twitter, or Facebook. You can also feature top-rated comments from your followers.

Wrap up

If you’re wondering where to go next with your email marketing campaign, your social media pages can point you in the right direction. 

From something as basic as a quick rant on Twitter to a full-blown product review on Youtube, online user activity provides insight into the various aspects of consumer behavior. You’ll understand what motivates and inspires your followers, what keeps them glued to your brand, and what drives them to purchase (or not purchase) a product.

Many of the most successful emails work around these types of customer data from other platforms. Social media and email integration show how a business is capable of leveraging customer engagement to further provide creative and consistent content, whether on the website, by email, or on Instagram.