Email can be used effectively to bridge your customers, prospects and anyone else on your email list to the more regular conversations that you are having on Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites. So why aren’t more email marketers building this bridge?
A recent study by Email Data Source and Goodmail Systems found that just over half of email marketers who engage in social networking are including a link to their Twitter and Facebook profiles in email campaigns. Perhaps even more surprising, less than 30 percent of marketers provide a link to their social networking channels on their websites.
“…Online retailers that [did] link to their social media pages in e-mail campaigns were somewhat more likely to also promote them on their Website. Still, the majority of the Internet Retailer top 100 sites (63%) did not link to a social media presence..” read more
Bridging email recipients and website visitors to the more regular conversations that you are having on Twitter and Facebook will certainly increase the number of people who are following you on those social networking platforms. So why aren’t people leveraging email and websites to invite people to join their ongoing conversations?
One guess is that there aren’t any conversations going on. I imagine that many companies with Twitter and Facebook accounts have them because they think they should. They are not actively participating in industry conversations or providing immediate streams of support for their products or services on Twitter or Facebook.
Just having a Facebook or Twitter profile isn’t enough. You have to invite people to join your conversations and be available to participate in them yourself. If you have an email list that you communicate with every month, that’s a good place to start.
You should also add links to your Twitter and Facebook profiles in your signatures that appear in your email, blog comments, forum posts and anywhere else where you digital signature is used.
Have you built strong bridges between email, Twitter, Facebook, your blog and your website? If not, why not?
You’re in the top half of your class! Good job.
I have been linking to my Twitter on my Website but it’s a good idea to put Twitter and Facebook as a signature in the emails.