Where we are now

The development of technology has opened avenues in marketing that weren’t possible even a few years ago. But as the number of channels has grown, so has the challenge of driving customers along their purchase journey.

In this guide we’ll explore how you can use email marketing and social media together to reach your desired audience, and enhance the impact of your message. By making your data work harder, you can improve targeting and maximize your chances of success.

The social media landscape is vast, but we are going to focus on two of the social channels that are most open to integration with email marketing, and offer more advanced targeting opportunities: Twitter and Facebook.

What we’re going to cover

After reading this guide, you’ll learn how you can use the power of email and social media marketing together to:

• Increase the size of your email list
• Re-engage your existing subscribers
• Make the most out your data

Using social media to increase your email list

An email address is a universal passport that consumers use to navigate the digital world. Without it, they wouldn’t be able to login to their social accounts, shop online or even activate their gadgets. But it’s more than that; it’s by far their preferred channel for marketing communications. And it’s also the number one channel for ROI.

However, building an email list of engaged contacts can sometimes be tricky. Since social media offers the opportunity for genuine interaction with potential customers, why not use that to your advantage?

Let’s explore the potential to grow your email list with two of the most popular social networks: Twitter and Facebook.

Gathering data with Twitter cards

What are Twitter Cards?

Twitter Cards expand the capabilities of normal Twitter functions, and give you additional space for more information to give to your followers. You can include a variety of media (photos, video, etc.) as well as up to 200 additional characters.

This makes them a very effective tool to entice consumers to sign up to your email list, attracting them with high quality content or special offers. Most Twitter Cards are available by adding metadata to your website.

Where do they appear?

The cards are currently displayed on Twitter webpages, as well as the Twitter iOS and Android clients. They won’t necessarily display in third-party social applications, like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite or Oktopost. Instead, they will be replaced by a link leading to your chosen fallback URL, such as a landing page for signing-up to your subscriber list.

Types of Twitter Cards

• Summary Card
• Summary Card with Large Image
• Photo Card
• Gallery Card
• App Card
• Player Card
• Product Card
• Lead Generation Card
• Website Card

Can all cards help you gather data?

No. While all of them can be useful, the ones that can help with data capture are the Lead Generation Card and the Website Card. These have call-to-action buttons and are only available with advertising accounts.

What is a Lead Generation Card?

In terms of design, this card has a large image and a call-to-action (CTA) button. But its biggest advantage is that it enables one-click signup. By simply clicking the button, users can sign-up to your database without ever leaving the platform.

What data do you receive?

The platform will pass on the user’s name, Twitter handle and email address. This can be downloaded at any time from Twitter, or exported automatically to your CRM or email system. B2B businesses with a lead-qualifying process might want finer control of the automatic data export, but even with manual data transfer, this can still be a good way to grow newsletter lists.

How do you create a Lead Generation Card?

The creative

The elements you can input are:

• Short description or title – up to 50 characters
• Image – 800 x 200 pixels
• Call-to-action copy for the button – up to 20 characters
• URL leading to your privacy policy
• Fallback URL in case users view the card on a non-supported platform, or they want to find out more about your offer

As you may have noticed, you get half the characters of a regular tweet, so make use of your image to really communicate your offer.

Tip: Don’t use generic stock photos, as they won’t add value to your message.

The settings

You have the option to direct users to a landing page after they signup, just as you would when they download something from your website. Or you can add a message of up to 100 characters.

Tip: Whatever the option, take the opportunity to thank them, and reinforce the value they get by signing up.

The data collection

The next step is deciding what happens to your leads after they are collected. You can either download them manually from the Twitter advertising account, or you can schedule an automatic export to your CRM platform. When you export to CRM, specify the exact field names in your database, as Twitter’s ‘name’ tag might be set as ‘fullname’ in your CRM platform.

Tip: Add hidden values to help you identify the source of the lead so you can establish the effectiveness of your Twitter campaign.

Tips for Lead Generation Cards:

• Make the benefits to consumers clear through a compelling offer, such as a competition or discount. Don’t just ask for sign-ups without offering something in exchange
• Make your call-to-action distinctive and clear. Think ‘Join our VIP club’, not just ‘Sign-up’
• Test, test, test! You won’t know what works with your specific audience until you try different options
• Follow-up with an email to complete the double opt-in process, give details of the benefits of being subscribed, and set expectations

The Website Card

This card is great for promoting a point of data collection, like a competition or a whitepaper hidden behind a form.

How do you create a Website Card?

This card takes slightly less time and effort to set up, because users are led to a landing page where your chosen lead generation process can kick in. So all you need to set are the creative elements:

• Title – up to 70 characters
• Image – 800 x 320 pixels
• Chosen URL
• A choice of CTA text from the drop-down menu

Unlike the Lead Generation Card, you cannot specify your own text for the button, so you need to choose one of following options:

• Read more
• Shop now
• View now
• Visit now
• Book now
• Learn more
• Play now
• Donate
• Apply here
• Quote here
• Order now
• Book tickets

Tips for Website Cards:

• Take advantage of the slightly larger image to communicate your offer more clearly
• You can include text in your image to overcome the strict character limit, but limit it to what you could easily read in a quick glance. With an average of 6,000 tweets being sent per second, your followers need to get the point right away
• Make sure the URL doesn’t just lead to your homepage, but to a landing page reiterating the message in your Website Card
• Testing is the only way to find out what really works with your audience

Know what you’re paying for

As these cards are part of Twitter’s advertising offering, you can specify a target audience for them and exclude your followers if you wish. But keep in mind that the tweet will appear as a ‘promoted tweet’ in your audience’s feed, and it will only appear on the website, official desktop and mobile clients.

Gathering data using your Facebook page

There are three main ways to gather email addresses through Facebook. Make sure you take advantage of the unrestricted text and media opportunities in this channel to really entice potential subscribers.

Create a newsletter sign-up tab

This is simply an email sign-up form embedded in a Facebook page. But its placement at the top of your page makes sure it doesn’t get lost among all the other posts in your page feed.

How do I create one?

The steps for building a sign-up tab vary, depending on your email service provider. Some of them offer an integrated app, while others rely on embedding 3rd party code to display the data collection form. Contact your provider to find out more.

Hold exclusive competitions or sweepstakes

Give your Facebook fans a chance to win something in exchange for submitting their data. But be transparent about subscribing them to your email list, and give them the chance to refuse.

Otherwise, if you force people to do something, you’ll only end up with frustrated contacts who don’t want to hear from you. And you’ll waste your money emailing them. When you create a form for the competition, you have two options.

Access profile details

You can use the function of accessing their details straight from the users’ profile, but keep in mind this could deter privacy-conscious users from entering. While you can offset the impact of this by heavily incentivising them, you will inevitably lose a percentage of users.

Also, if you use this quick option, the data you gather is owned by Facebook, not you. Do you want to sacrifice ease of signing up, or do you sacrifice the ownership of the data?

Manual entry

Alternatively, ask your Facebook fans to enter their details and email address for a chance to win. That way, they know exactly what details they are handing over. And the data belongs to you.

Tip: Asking for their birthday will allow you to send a ‘Happy birthday’ email with a discount code for an extra incentive to purchase.

Promote your gated content

Share any whitepapers, eGuides or reports in your posts, and lead users to the form page. If you’re a B2C company, like a fashion outlet, share your brand magazine. By holding your most valuable content back for those that sign up, you give consumers an incentive to share their data.

Keep in mind that consumers might forget that they’ve entered your competition, and given you their details. So ask for their permission to email during registration, and then send a confirmation email to be on the safe side.

Two success stories

Here's a great example of how using social media helped Harry’s build a list of 100,000 contacts in one week. They relied on word-of-mouth to create buzz around their brand before launching, by offering a trial of their products if interested customers would refer their friends.

Another great example comes from Media 10, who tapped into already-established Star Trek fan communities to attract interest for their event. They invited fans to join a ‘Starfleet’ list to receive exclusive news and pre-sale tickets. This brought them 12,000 new contacts and made ticket sales a breeze.

Retargeting on social media using email addresses

Sometimes your audience doesn’t want to engage with your emails, but actually prefers social channels for interaction. How do you reach those subscribers, particularly if they haven’t followed or liked you beforehand? Now you can, thanks to Facebook’s Custom Audiences and Twitter’s Tailored Audiences.

Both these services work from a list of ‘hashed’ email addresses. Think of it like a fingerprint that can’t be decrypted, stored with every contact. Once advertisers upload their data, ‘fingerprints’ are matched, and the particular audience is shown the corresponding ad campaign. In this process, your data is safe, and the exact identity of the users is kept private.

Identify the un-engaged

Investigate your data. Look at your email reports and identify the subscribers who haven’t opened, clicked or converted from your emails for a while. Your retargeting goal will dictate which of these options you need to choose. For example, if you’re looking for subscribers who haven’t purchased anything in a year, clicks and conversions are appropriate options.

Tip: We recommend you start with analysing a year’s worth of data.

Retargeting campaign themes:

• Inform subscribers about your new products, discounts and special deals
• Offer custom deals based on buying status
• Encourage existing customers to make repeat purchases of lifecycle products like magazines or ink cartridges, just as you would with email
• Run targeted promotions for specific segments of customers, such as loyalty card scheme members, ... etc
• Encourage prospects to download an important report or research you’ve conducted

Twitter Tailored Audiences: What are they?

Tailored Audiences allow you to select a particular part of your audience to give you more control over your advertising campaigns. You can create an audience based on website visitors, or email list subscribers. In order to target website visitors, you need the help of a retargeting service (such as Adroll, Retargeter or Fetchback) to set up the necessary tracking. We’re going to focus on email subscribers.

How to set up Tailored Audiences based on email addresses

Similar to Twitter Cards, you need a Twitter Ads account in order to use Tailored Audiences.

1. In your advertising account, click the Tools option at the top of the page
2. From the options, choose Audience Manager
3. Click 'Create New List Audience' and select ‘upload your own list’ in order to use your email database
4. Choose a name for your Tailored Audience
5. Choose the type of data, for this case - email addresses
6. Upload a .csv or txt. file with your data.

Targeting your newly-created audience

After you’ve created your target audience, it will appear under the targeting options when you create a new campaign. From here, you can follow your regular advertising strategy, like creating a promoted tweet, or better yet, a Twitter Card with embedded media.

Twitter will help you select the appropriate advertising solution based on your goals. During the campaign creation process, you can also allow Twitter to find users similar to your Tailored Audience if you want to expand your reach.

Facebook’s Custom Audiences: what are they?

Facebook Custom Audiences can be built using website visitors, your email database, phone numbers, Facebook IDs or mobile advertiser IDs. We’ll look at the email option.

How to set up Custom Audiences based on email addresses

1. Go to your Facebook Ads Manager page
2. Click ‘Audience’ in the left side bar, and click ‘Create Custom Audience’
3. For email-based retargeting, select 'Customer List'
4. Upload a .csv or .txt file with the contacts, or copy and paste the data

Keep in mind

• For optimum results, Facebook recommends that your Custom Audience has at least 1,000 contacts, but it will allow you to use a smaller list
• It may take around 30 minutes for the Custom Audience to be created at first
• The next time you run a campaign, you can choose a Custom Audience right away
• You can create Lookalike campaigns that target similar types of customers to your Custom Audience to expand your reach

Two success stories

TechCrunch reported on an ecommerce company called OpenSky, which used Facebook’s Custom Audiences with an email address retargeting. They achieved a 30% improved conversion rate compared to their regular batch and blast email approach.

An entertainment client used Twitter’s Tailored Audiences to drive sales of tickets for two movies: ‘Godzilla’ and ‘X-Men: The days of future past’. They targeted users who had interacted with actors and films associated with these two movies, and achieved three times better engagement rates and two times better sales than a regular campaign.

Integrating your email and social marketing

As you have seen, there is strong potential to use social media to acquire new data, and use the current data you have to convert subscribers that haven't quite made the jump to becoming a customer.

But there are yet more ways to build upon email and social success to improve marketing results. Using email marketing and social media marketing as separate, but tandem channels can be a strong strategy to reinforce a message as part of a multi-channel campaign.

Suggestions for reinforcing your messages

There are many ways in which coordinating email marketing and social media campaigns can have a positive impact on your business. Here are just a few:

• Insert social sharing buttons in your email to expand the potential reach of your content to your subscribers’ friends and followers
• Take reviews up a notch: insert Facebook and Twitter user comments of your product or service as a way of adding social proof
• Use social media to build excitement around a particular event by targeting a community that is already engaged via email and vice versa
• Promote social competitions in your email newsletters
• Social media has great potential to be used as a feedback mechanism, allowing your existing customers to give open feedback about your business. You can also use positive feedback from your current customers to attract new ones.

Invest resources wisely

While you want consumers to notice your campaign and move into the sales funnel to make a purchase, you do not want to over-saturate them with constant advertising. Putting a message in front of someone via every medium (several social sites, email, and more) on regular intervals may cause your customers to unsubscribe and avoid your brand, due to excessive exposure to your campaigns.

Instead, tailor your campaigns to different audience types; specify these by gender, age, hobbies, interests, stage in their buying cycle, industry and so on. And modify your creative to fit the audience and the channel.

Email and Social Media – the Yin and Yang of Marketing

Both channels have their proven strengths, but together they can help you reach your audience in different ways. While email marketing has shown to bring 40 times more customers than Facebook and Twitter, social media can be a great way to interact with customers and add a human touch.

Social media can speak to billions of consumers, with Facebook accounting for 1.35 billion active users and Twitter for almost 300 million users. On the other hand, email marketing can help you maintain a more consistent brand voice. In 2014, email marketing was cited as the most effective digital marketing channel for customer retention in the United States.

Go on, what are you waiting for?

You should now understand how to use social marketing to gather data, how to retarget email subscribers on social media to increase conversions, and how to use both channels to reinforce your message. So you’re ready to create stunning marketing campaigns that will work even harder for your brand.