In this modern day and time, traditional marketing methods will not be able to provide the desired results.
With the advancement of technology and increased popularity in social media, you will need to think of other ways that will help you to tap into large numbers of mobile users.
However, this does not mean you will have to give up your traditional ways of marketing.
All you need to do is make a few changes here and there, and essentially combine social media channels with your email marketing campaigns.
This is however a delicate art as it has been always and therefore should be handled with care.
For the proficient, this can be useful but for the others, it can be a real headache.
It is, for this reason, that large companies totally separate social media and email marketing teams.
However, there are a few risks to this approach such as:
- The marketing strategies and the content are often found not to be perfectly aligned, and
- As a result, the channels function in a silo.
Since you cannot afford to maintain two different teams, the best approach is to combine the two.
This will not only save you money, but will also ensure that everyone involved works in tandem and discussion to ensure the best possible outcomes.
With the direct touch of your email marketing campaigns and a dedicated channel like Instagram working together, you will surely have a rapid-fire mobile engagement.
Such integration will help grow both channels.
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Background
Before you delve into integrating Instagram and email marketing to power your marketing the processes, you should know a bit of the background:
- Instagram today is the fastest growing social media network that has outpaced Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn, having over 800 million users who are active every month.
- Most of businesses and brands use the photo and video sharing app to the fullest to promote their services and product and direct their Instagram followers towards their site to increase their level of organic traffic.
The platform provides marketers with the best launchpad for promoting their business, as there are several useful features, tools, and opportunities provided by Instagram.
- One such useful feature and benefit is that you can host a contest around an automated feed of some of the recent Instagram photos to increase the level of engagement amongst the users. You can promote a branded hashtag to your subscriber base that will guarantee that more customers will engage with your Instagram campaign. If you reward them with a gift card or a coupon you can achieve even better results.
- In addition to that, the platform also provides you with the opportunity to give a personal touch to the Instagram photos when you use shots of people using your product. This will create a true sense of community around your brand.
However, Instagram posts have a relatively short lifespan, but if you have contextual marketing platform you will be able to integrate your targeted email campaigns with the latest Instagram photos in realtime.
This will ensure that you create a more engaging and dynamic experience using both of the channels in tandem.
Approach for Integration
There are a few specific approaches that you may follow while integrating email and Instagram for achieving better results from your marketing efforts.
- When you use contextual marketing it will help you to serve the newest social content through your emails and transform every single email of yours into an exhilarating invitation to something that may be happening at a specific moment.
- You may also include your social profiles in your email template via social icons. These social icons are usually located at the bottom of the email. This approach will make the use of templates more subtle and effective.
- When you use both the channels you will be able to make subscribers your social fans and the social fans to become your subscribers as well. The primary goal is to make them join your subscribers’ list or to follow you on the social networks depending on which they have not done yet.
- Offer discounts that are specific to each particular channel when the users perform a request and follow the way desired to do that. This will encourage your email subscribers to become your social fans regardless of wherever they are.
- Proper use of social ads is another good approach to target your email subscribers and direct them to the desired product pages. This is in fact the most common thing that you will see in your newsfeed to help track cookies from the visits to the website.
- You must follow the Rule of Seven in marketing as that is the easiest way for both social media and email to make a contact before any customer makes a purchasing decision from you, which after all is your ultimate goal.
- In order to build your email list you may also use your community like the Facebook group. There are several ways in which you can do this. One good way is asking those who want to join the group to provide their email address through specific questions asked for group onboarding.
- Another way is to use a lead magnet as your cover image. Make sure that this lead magnet has a link in the image description that will take the users to the desired product page.
Sharing your content between channels is an obvious approach that you should implement, especially if you are into larger marketing campaign.
However, when you do so you must make sure that you use the same content that you wish to adopt for each medium and across all the distribution channels.
This will keep your messages recognizable and consistent.
All these courses of actions are necessary to succeed.
All you have to do is use your content wisely and add a great video or a well-illustrated photo across email and social media platforms such as Instagram.
Author Bio
Pete Campbell is a social media manager and has immense knowledge about email marketing and Instagram promotion. He delights his clients by helping them get great results. He loves to travel, write and play baseball.