Getting Social With E-mail Marketing
 By Pamela Adams, Regional Development Director, Constant Contact

You use e-mail marketing to reach your customers. You might be using social media to connect with them too. But are you enjoying the best of both worlds and getting the most out of your online marketing efforts by leveraging the two in one unified communications strategy? By doing so, you can create a never-ending circle that will fuel a successful marketing effort.

Share your content on social media sites: If you're using social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, there's no need to create all-new content for each one. Repurpose your newsletter (and blog posts, if you have one) on Twitter and Facebook. You can use your e-mail subject line or the headline from your lead article as the text for your tweet, with a link to the piece. Do something similar on Facebook, where the headline, description and a related image (if available) will appear, making your content even more attractive to potential readers.

If your newsletter typically contains multiple articles, mentally break each issue up into chunks and share one piece every day (or every week) on social media. Now you have multiple days' worth of content to feed your social media channels without involving much extra work. And remember to add a “Share” button to your outgoing newsletters. This will allow your recipients to easily share your newsletter content with their own social media circles.

Bring social media to your e-mail: Social media can also be used to generate content for your newsletter efforts and drive new subscribers to your list.

From a content perspective, if a customer, client, prospect, or member asks you a question on a social media site (or you see a question whose answer would benefit your audience) use the question and your answer as the basis for a newsletter article. You can also watch for industry-related trends on your social media sites and comment on them in your newsletter. This is particularly good for LinkedIn, where the discussion forums are quite active.

How do you get your social media audience to subscribe to your e-mail newsletter if they're not already? Give them a tease. Let's say you own a tennis equipment store and happen to land a quick interview with tennis star Serena Williams that you plan to publish in your next newsletter. Post a note on your social media sites: "Subscribe to my newsletter to read my interview with Serena Williams!" Don't forget to include a link so people can join your mailing list.

 Make it easy for them to connect with you or join your list: Add the “Join My Mailing List” form, button or link to your website, blog and social network profiles. Use the Join My List app to include a tab on your Facebook profile. And add the social network buttons in your e-mail campaign and link them to your profile.

Posting your e-mail content to social media sites and soliciting content ideas via your networks is just the beginning. Utilize the three keys to e-mail marketing (connect, inform, grow) and the three keys to social networking (observe, interact, integrate) to build lasting, valuable customer relationships.