Clint Smith, Co-Founder and CEO of Emma Email Marketing, talked to us about how social media and email marketing complement and reinforce one another, and also how Emma is addressing these trends.
The emergence of social media is transforming the notion of “forward to a friend” functionality. Adding a dash of social media to your email marketing recipe involves more than just slapping Twitter and Facebook links into your email template, though it can certainly start there. But what will compel your audience to take action? And when they do, what then? How do social media and email marketing complement and reinforce one another?
It’s All About the Design
In a crowded in-box, a professional design stands out and get noticed. Emma has always offered design services but is investigating how to empower customers to collaborate on design while still maintaining quality with a graphical editor. Emma is also looking at templating solutions to ensure consistency when a customer is adding content to an email.
It’s Also All About the Content
Smith thinks that Twitter has done us a favor. By limiting its messages to 140 characters, Twitter makes us get to the point, which is a plus in that ever more crowded in-box where your email newsletter has to compete for attention. Keep the content brief, relevant, and friendly.
Warm It Up
Give your customers the warm fuzzies with messages that speak to them and their interests. Give them a reason to care so that they will click those Twitter and Facebook links. The Emma persona has always given Emma Email Marketing a personal touch, from its broader customer-loving practices like the Emma 25 Initiative, which invites customers to nominate and vote on worthy organizations to receive one of 25 free Emma accounts each year, to the tiny details in messaging that seem to talk straight to you.
Emma's Web Site Has Personality in the Tiny Details
Build Inherently Social Content
Email and social media allow information to be shared lightening-fast. First, though, people have to be interested enough to share what you have to say. Make content that is eminently sharable, like Emma’s Super-Awesomify Your Backpack campaign. This campaign, rolled out for SXSW 2010, benefits the Feeding America backpack program and relies on audience participation. Simply click the backpack to make it super-awesome, and you’ve just helped Feeding America provide food to a child in need. After my backpack was made super-awesome, I was invited to opt into a followup email and share my experience via social media. The more clicks, the more backpacks get filled with food and distributed. (So visit the site and start clicking, folks!)
A Company That Does Email+Social Right
Smith presented Quirk Classics (publisher of the infamous Pride and Prejudice and Zombies…you have heard of it, haven’t you?) as a company that does a great job incorporating its email and social media marketing.
- Quirk sends timely, relevant messages—are you building your content around what’s happening with your company?
- Quirk knows that its blog is its content hub—do you know what your content hub is?
- Quirk tweets discounts on Twitter—how do you reward customers for staying connected to you?
- Quirks provides complimentary copies of their new releases to bloggers who write reviews—how do you empower your customers to spread the word for you?
- Quirk does not send identical messages through all of its communication channels. What is your plan for tailoring content to its respective channel and tying it all together?
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