Everybody speaks about it. Actually, everybody speaks only about this: social media. In fact, they speak how social media integrate with email. This is not a love-hate relationship, as they say, but one that can turn into a win-win situation. But it has to be handled with care.

ONE BASIC THING: social media could never exist without the email. Email is the most important thing, because it facilitates the communication/interaction of sites/applications with those using them. Everything goes through the email: signing up, confirmations and notifications of any kind. Everything is in the email account(s): users and passwords, notifications from facebook, twitter or LinkedIn invitations. Although users are not active on those websites, they are nevertheless notified of all alerts.

What do the marketers say

According to a study of MarketingSherpa, 50% of the responding marketers answered that social media and email were somehow complementary, while 39% said they were absolutely complementary.
Responding marketers also said social media were complementary to other media, such as email (97%), that they were becoming a standard tactics for most companies (88%), an important tool, but they are not going to replace email altogether (49%). 12% said social media would replace email in time.

According to the study, email needs the social media and the social media need email. Benefits work both ways.

As far as marketers are concerned, social media enable email to reach a much wider audience. Social media can be used as a liaising tool and can help marketers collect new leads, meaning contacts in the database. At the same time, social media provides a low control over how the message is disseminated, unlike email, where the control is better.

As far as users are concerned, email is as essential as one can be for existence in the social media, because – as I already said – you need to have an email address in order to have an account in any of the social networks.

How do actually emails and social media integrate with each other?

Marketers are even more prone to using social media in their commercial communication, but the much better results of one-to-one communication do not have to be ignored either. Therefore, you need to think how to integrate the two components i.e. email with twitter, facebook, youtube or any other social network. It depends on what you want to communicate.
Integrating email with social media brings users an opportunity to share the information they get in a newsletter, in social networks; users get links which – once clicked on by twitter or facebook friends, take the latter to the respective newsletter. This will enable marketers to connect the email address in the database to the twitter or facebook accounts of the subscribers who posted the information from the newsletter on their own profiles. In this way, you can look at more data, such as:

- what user generated more clicks (Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, MySpace, etc.);
- what users generated RT’s of the information posted on their accounts (Twitter);
- what discussions a particular post generated (Facebook discussion board, Youtube comments).

This kind of integration enables marketers to get control over the messages that are posted on social media and get to know those persons who can generate an impact. Marketers can analyse the reactions that are generated by posting the link in the newsletter and – above all – what subscribers attract the largest number of reactions.
On top of that, based on a history of previous newsletters, marketers get data about the preferences of subscribers.

They also get information about what subscribers read in the past, based on an account of the accessed links, or what they bought. Depending on this kind of information, the relevance of messages or future offers grows; you can actually turn your subscribers into “spokespersons”.

The relevance is important in both cases. When it comes to email, it influences the opening rates, the unsubscribe rates and the spam complaint rates. As regards social media, for instance Twitter, relevance influences the number of followers. The more informative the tweets, the more followers will want to keep an eye on you.

Outputs

The email provides measurable outputs. You can actually see the output of an email marketing campaign, you can see the results, such as the ROI.
Unfortunately, there are no such results for the social media. That is why we insist again on the idea to integrate the two components, because emails are measurable.

Case studies

We have recently started to use in our email marketing campaigns specific tools that enable the integration of emails with the social networks.

For example, for one of our customers – in auto industry – we integrated share this on Twitter and share this on Facebook buttons in the email campaigns. This is how recipients pressing those buttons could post the newsletter information in the profiles they had on those social networks. Actually they posted a short link that would take visitors to the respective newsletter, so their Facebook friends or Twitter followers could click the link and read the newsletter too, if they considered it interesting.

One benefit that social media brings to email is the possibility to enhance the database, by attracting new contacts to your own newsletter, which – if considered relevant – can turn readers into subscribers, but also into future customers.

Do you want to make the most of the social media? Send relevant information to your newsletter subscribers, so that they get a good reason to promote and recommend your newsletter in their turn; that information should be customisable depending on network: twitter, facebook, LinkedIn, etc.