by Wikus Engelbrecht - GraphicMail Marketing Team
25. luglio 2010 23:38
Online marketers are blessed with a range of effective marketing tools: Email marketing, blogs and the most recent, social media marketing.
It’s no surprise, in a digital world, that integrating these various tools has become a wildly spread, ever-more popular, trendy and effective. It makes sense really.
Much has been said about the efficiency of email marketing – and as a GraphicMail blog reader you’re clearly aware of the value email carries as one of the longest top-performing direct marketing channels. Email marketing has been proven to be a particularly effective direct communication channel. It builds and maintains relationships with existing customers.
Blogs provide an informative and conversational channel where you can further build on this customer relationship and even lure new potential clients who stumble across your blog – especially if you give them relevant, hip content and commentary.
Social media marketing has proven to be a great interactive channel between marketers and their audience. In fact, it moves from being an “audience” to a virally growing community – and therefore a great way to extend your audience.
Now I don’t know about you, but merging together channels that build and maintain consumer relations with channels that grow consumer markets – well, that sounds like a good idea to me. That’s why GraphicMail has slowly been adding tools and features to make it easier for you to converge your online marketing channels. We want to assist you and your business to be prepared for this next wave of online expansion.
Last year we enabled you to place social widgets in your email footer so your subscribers can share your newsletters through their social network accounts. Basically, you can add little Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Digg, Stumble Upon, delicious and Google Share icons to the footer of your email. Should your subscribers have an account with any of these social networks they can click on the widget of that network to share your newsletter with their social contacts on that network. They can also share on more than one network. Say for instance I have a Facebook page and a Twitter account and I know that many of my friends or followers work for companies that might be interested in your newsletter on Human Resources – I simply click on the Facebook and Twitter widgets to share a link to your newsletter with all my contacts in the form of a Facebook post and a tweet.
Earlier this year we also enabled a reporting tool to complement your social widget action! It allows you to track who shared your newsletter and through which network they shared it – as with all our reports and stats you can drill down to individual subscribers to see exactly who it was that performed these actions. (I’m finding it very useful in our own email campaigns.) Identifying individual subscribers gives you insights into what information they particularly like, making it easier to target them accordingly through segmentation or targeted emails.
Our most recent social integration feature is Social Share. This handy tool allows you to share your newsletters with your friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter. (It was initially only enabled for Twitter, but extended it to Facebook just last week – give it a try!) Other than the social widgets, which allow subscribers to share your email on their social networks, this one enables you to do so yourself. It’s an excellent way to extend your email reach at no extra cost to your business.
This trend of integrating social and email marketing is growing at a fast pace. We’re still exploring all the options and I think you’ll find our integration tools will become more and more advanced as we go along. It’s going to be interesting to see where this is all headed…
Want to see these tools in action? Watch the video!
