Last time I wrote about Social media tools and tactics for email marketing. In short: the email strategy and tools available to you determine your success in combining Social media with email marketing. So what type of social media functions are available?

Here are some examples of social media functions that are available inside your email marketing tools:

Automatically add social widgets and avoid the brick wall

Adding social media buttons is the easiest way to promote your social channels in your email and get more overlap with your audience being both email subscribers and fans and followers. Your email software can do this for you. Within your email template it’s able to place the “follow us on media X” buttons.

Caution: If you are asking your email subscribers to follow you on social channels. You do have to offer something of value on that platform. In a study I did on the Email marketing in the dutch Travel industry, 15% of the companies that included a “follow us on social” function weren’t active on those channels at all.

Just adding a button without activity actually causes brand-devaluation. It’s like driving customers into a brick wall. Part of your social media strategy should be to welcome them with some juicy content once they arrive at your social channels. The people going to your social channels from your email are most likely the active part of your subscriber and client base, so give them something to talk about.

Start sharing, but stop stealing attention

It gets more interesting when you want to share a certain piece of content.

Adding a share link or button would normally require an email marketer to manually enter and test the URL to that content, email tools can now do this for you, making the process more efficient.

But always monitor the usage of the share links. If your audience isn’t using them, they are just stealing space and attention from the rest of your message. One alternative would be to let people share the whole newsletter instead of each individual article.

Publishing and socially re-publishing your email newsletters

The best newsletters are carefully crafted and shaped to win (interaction). While there are many strategies to distribute content, it would be a waste not to re-publish this message to social channels.

Syndication

It’s possible to re-publish a newsletter to your fans and followers on channels like Facebook and twitter. To do this you need to generate an online version of the newsletter and post it with a triggering description like “take a look at our lastest newsletter”. The new functions in email tools let you syndicate content across channels. So you can actually schedule status updates from within your email tools, which is a big time saver that will streamline your workflow.

Future social media features that will appear in your email tool

There are more social features becoming available and the number will only grow. For instance:

  • * Loading social media data to enrich profiles (sometimes called a part of eCRM).
  • * Social sign up functions that uses social account login for easy newsletter sign up and registration.
  • * More advanced reporting of social media usage (form email) and sharing.

As more channels like Google Plus, Pintrest and social media channel X appear and new functions on these platform develop, the email tools will be keeping pace. The easier it gets to combine email & social, the more options the email marketer has to deploy his own social media plans.

This post was written for the email marketing guys over at GraphicMail, but I liked it so much I just had to post it here first