skip to Main Content

Email & Social Media – by the numbers

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

Sometimes, we’re lucky enough to hook up with clients or potential clients who are fully aware of the need for their businesses to be in the social space. They might not know exactly how to go about it but they get it. They understand where their consumers are. And then we work with them to decide how best to approach social communications for their business and help them execute the plan.

And sometimes, we’re lucky enough to hook up with clients who aren‘t fully aware of the magnitude of this change. I say “lucky” because it’s really kinda fun to talk to people about the explosive growth going on in the online and social marketing arena. And to watch it sink in as the numbers add up.

It is interesting that the creator of the above-embedded video (not us, by the way) included email statistics. I’m not sure if his point was to demonstrate how much spam email exists as opposed to the opt-in participation on the various social sites (which is true) but it also pointed out how much email is still being used – despite the death knell that some on the internet are tolling for it.

Although social communication/media may be ultimately integrated into email (see Google Buzz, launched earlier this year), email still has a great degree of utility. Not everything can be or should be condensed to 140 or 160 characters for text and Twitter. Not everything needs to be publicly shared.

K2Media always explores email marketing with our clients and potential clients. Are they using it? What platform are they using? What are the goals of their emails? Schedules? Content? Design? Recipient database? How can we improve it? Grow it?

Ultimately, we think that a well-designed email marketing strategy with visually-appealing emails can be an important part of a company’s overall online marketing plan. And we use email to promote other social media profiles – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., making sure to allow fans in those spaces the opportunity to sign up for email newsletters as well.

We always advise our clients to cross-promote in this manner. Email marketing pieces might not have a tremendously high open-rate but if you get your consumer to open one email, make sure you’ve included an invitation to interact with your company or brand somewhere else. Then the next time you’ve got a message to send out, you’re more likely to capture that set of eyes – maybe not via email but maybe on Facebook where they’ve become a fan, or vice versa.

Another cross-promotional opportunity is to treat your email piece as a newsletter, with an article or an excerpt from your company’s blog – you can even hyperlink from the email to your blog and/or include a sign-up form to subscribe to your blog via email or through a feed reader.

Do you cross-promote between your website, your blog and your social media profiles? Other than the suggestions we gave here, what else do you do? How else do you capture those readers across platforms?

Back To Top