BY BLAKE MILLER Email marketing remains one of the key communication tools for business. Eighty-two percent of companies today are ...
Email marketing remains one of the key communication tools for business. Eighty-two percent of companies today are leveraging email marketing. The ability to segment lists plus personalize and tailor messages to any part of your audience has wide appeal. But with so many companies leveraging this channel, how can you differentiate your email marketing campaigns? One effective way is to integrate other marketing channels into your email marketing.
Integration can actually help take your email marketing efforts to the next level and provide added usability and connectivity benefits for your customers. These are four key areas to consider as you begin email marketing integration.
Email and Social Media
Leveraging social media platforms within your email marketing can drastically impact the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. Emails that include social media sharing buttons have a 158% higher click-through rate than emails sent without them. Most email marketing service providers make it very easy to add social sharing buttons within email campaigns. You can also segment your email lists by social media network to better target specific types of users, offering them a more personalized experience.
You can also use social media to drive email sign-ups. The pin tweet feature of Twitter enables users to leave a Twitter card at the top of a profile, urging people to sign up for an email list. Tactics like this can be effective in growing your email list.
Email and Mobile
Today, 64% of decision-makers read their email on their mobile device. And this number is only going to grow. Integrating your email efforts with mobile optimization is a natural progression. When you craft email marketing campaigns, it's important to test them on different mobile devices. Since many of these devices have different screen sizes, testing compatibility is key.
Email optimization doesn't end with testing for mobile devices. If your email contains links sending customers to landing pages or web pages, you need to ensure that these pages are optimized for mobile. You worked really hard to get them to click through to your landing page; you'd hate to ruin your success by taking them to a non-optimized piece of content.
Email and Search Marketing
Integrating email and search marketing can have a positive effect on your website search engine optimization (SEO). When you create email marketing campaigns, you can also generate HTML versions of emails and host them on your domain. Inside most emails, there will be header text that reads "not viewing properly, view email in web browser." This will take you to the HTML version of the email. Since you're creating a webpage with the email content, your domain will become more relevant to Google for the search terms associated inside of the email text. Doing this allows for an extra boost in usability for your customers plus it can help your site's SEO.
Email and Marketing Analytics
Tracking your marketing initiatives is as important as implementing them. Only 22% of mid-sized companiesuse analytics to manage their marketing campaigns. Without analytics, you can't gather any data to decide if the campaign was a success or failure.
Your email marketing platform should provide you with specific data around your email list. Items like open and click-through rates should be studied and used to enhance the content and how you communicate it.
Another easy way to track success is by implementing Google Analytics into your email campaigns. You can accomplish this by creating unique URLs for your landing page using Google's URL builder. These will show up in Google Analytics and allow you to easily track visitors and conversions. With this type of tracking, you can also A/B test your email marketing campaigns to understand what type of messaging, imagery, and content your users like best.
Integration of email marketing initiatives with other marketing channels will create a more streamlined and pleasing customer experience, plus enabling you to consistently build a unique marketing experience for your customers.
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