25 Ways to Sync Email Marketing with Facebook
November 24, 2014 | By Pam Neely | No Comments">No Comments
Have you ever heard Jay Baer’s discussion about how email is like Madonna and Facebook is like Lady Gaga? It’s an interesting analysis of how what’s old is new again. It’s also a helpful mindset for developing a marketing strategy that leverages two of the biggest stars of digital marketing.
Here are the fundamentals of email vs. Facebook as Madonna vs. Gaga. Both do fundamentally the same thing: They help you to stay in front of your audience. Email has been doing this for decades, much like Madonna. Facebook is a relative newcomer with some different features, but is essentially the same thing – much like Lady Gaga.
So while Facebook may be new and stylish (or newer, and more stylish), email marketing is still the powerhouse of most marketing departments. The Direct Marketing Association is still reporting a 4300% ROI for email. Also consider that Jay Baer developed this Madonna/Gaga theory before we saw Facebook’s organic reach decline.
The key takeaway here though is not to look at which channel is better, but to look at their similarities. They’re both great ways to communicate and build a relationship with your audience.
One other powerful thing Facebook and email share is mobile. About half of emails are now read on mobile devices, and about half of all Facebook users only use Facebook on mobile. It’s hard to overstate how critical mobile is, and Facebook and email are both excellent places to keep it top of mind.
Just like you need an email address to get a Facebook account, to try to silo these two platforms would hurt your results in both. So here are more than two dozen ways to integrate your Facebook marketing and email marketing. There are so many tactics available, in fact, that it’s easiest to break them up into groups, like this:
- Facebook page setup and apps
- Facebook posts
- Email marketing
- Testing, tracking and management
- Facebook advertising
Facebook page setup and apps
1) Add a signup tab to your Facebook page.
It’s the simplest integration to do, and you’ve heard it suggested so many times before. But have you actually added a signup tab to your Facebook page? It’s stunning how many brands haven’t. If you haven’t, it’s an easy win. Adding a sign up app with Heyo takes less than a half hour to set up, and integrate with directly with your MailChimp, AWeber or Constant Contact list. If you use a different email service provider and only have an embed code or prefer a custom HTML form, follow step by step instructions that are a snap to follow. Technophobes need not fear.
Extra tip: Offer people a coupon or a free resource to sweeten the deal. Like this:
2) Use your cover image to promote your signup offer.
You have to be dedicated to list building to make your cover image about signing up, but let me ask you: What else are you going to promote in that space that can potentially deliver a 4300% ROI?
3) Add an email-gated resource to your Facebook page.
As you know, like gates are out, but email “gates” are still okay. So use them. Offering a downloadable resource in exchange for an email address is one of the oldest Internet marketing tactics. It worked 16 years ago, and it still works now.
4) Make your Facebook cover clickable.
This is another way to redirect people from your Facebook page to your website, where they can sign up for your list. Want to get the most out of this traffic? Send people to a custom landing page designed just for Facebook visitors.
5) Add a link to promote your email newsletter in the long description of your About section.
6) You can add a link to an opt-in page in the short description, too.
It might be interesting to use the About sections different linking options to promote different signup offers.
7) Add a custom lead capture form to your Facebook page.
You can do that with Heyo’s Form widget to capture custom inputs from leads. There’s a tutorial here for how to do it, and a few images below that show what the steps look like. It takes less than ten clicks to set up.
You can use this for more than just quizzes. You could link to a free version of an online tool, then offer an upgraded version of the tool in exchange for an email address. Or you could link to a webinar sign up page, or to an online community that requires registration to join.
Facebook posts
8) Use posts to preview your email newsletters.
Announce your email newsletters on Facebook a few days before they’re published. This is the perfect segue into asking people to sign up. Include a link in your post to send people to an opt-in page specifically designed for – you guessed it – Facebook users.
9) Use posts to promote published emails.
Publish a short promo about each new issue of your newsletter as it’s published. And don’t be afraid to directly ask people to like your post; it works.
10) Run a Facebook contest to convert your Facebook fans into email subscribers.
This is one of the most powerful ways to build an email list on Facebook.
11) Just ask people to sign up for your list in your posts.
This one seems so obvious it’s easy to skip over, but it is completely legitimate to just remind people about your emails and ask them to sign up.
Email marketing
12) Add Facebook sharing buttons to the footer and header of your email newsletters.
Here’s a header example:
And a footer example:
Bonus: Remind readers of the benefits of liking your page on Facebook, like getting your latest updates, sales and new product announcements.
13) Include references, content and even shares from Facebook followers in your email updates.
Let people know what’s happening on your Facebook page in your email newsletters. Some users can be sensitive about seeing their comments and images get reused as marketing content, so err on the side of caution. Ask before you use their contributions.
14) Include prompts in your email newsletter for people to like different elements of your message – like a particular photo, or a specific article.
15) Add a prompt for people to like your Facebook page after they first sign up for your email list.
16) Offer a prompt for people to like your Facebook page after they unsubscribe.
Fab has done this in a small way here, but they could be doing much more. Often people unsubscribe just to clear out their inbox. That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t mind seeing your updates in their News Feed.
17) Any transactional email you send should include a prompt to follow you on Facebook.
This doesn’t have to be a blaring promotion. Just include an icon and a short sentence-long prompt. Keep any promotions in transactional emails to a minimum.
18) Send an email dedicated to encouraging people to like you on Facebook.
This can be especially effective if it’s one of a series of welcome emails.
Testing, Tracking and Management
19) Use your Facebook posts as a way to test what content to include in your email updates.
Your Facebook page is an excellent place to test which topics and headlines are most interesting to your audience. You can test with published posts, or with unpublished paid posts. Then take the best-performing posts and only include those in your emails. Result: Dramatically higher email engagement.
20) Use your Facebook posts to inform when you send email updates.
Is one particular day of the week always good for your Facebook posts? Have you tested if that same day might be best for email updates… and vice versa?
21) Integrate your Facebook people and your email people.
The people who manage your Facebook account should be the same people who manage your email marketing. Not possible? At least have them talk to each other – a lot.
22) Use Google Analytics cross-channel tracking to see where the two channels are intersecting, and how to make both of them more profitable.
On the Facebook side of things, use Audience Insights to see what’s working. Then head over to your email service provider dashboard to see what your email reports are saying.
Salesforce did a study earlier this year that found some extremely interesting data about how Facebook advertising can affect email marketing. This was the setup for the test: Over a two week period, an anonymous retailer “targeted 565,000 email subscribers with both its regular email marketing communications and coordinated Facebook News Feed ads.”
If you’ve been worrying that sending the same content to both your email list and your Facebook fans might be redundant, this data should ease some worry. Only 16% of this test audience saw both messages.
The biggest affect was on the email side. When Facebook ads were running, 77% more email messages got opened.
Do you know how your email marketing is affected by your Facebook advertising? Might be time to find out.
Facebook advertising
23) Promote your opt-in content with Facebook ads.
Got a free report you use to build your email list? Put some money into promoting it. Facebook ads aren’t free, but they’re certainly a legitimate stream of new traffic for you to convert into subscribers.
24) Upload your email list and use it to create a custom audience.
Custom audiences are one of the secret weapons of Facebook advertising. If you haven’t used your email list to either advertise to existing subscribers or to find more people who match their profiles, put it at the top of your to-do list.
25) Use your email list for Facebook retargeting.
Salesforce discovered that people who saw Facebook ads and opened email messages were 22% more likely to make a purchase. So if you’ve got a list of who’s opened your email messages lately, you can use that to create a custom audience and advertise to them, and see if you can lift sales by 22%. How’s that for an incentive?
That’s every way I could think of to integrate Facebook and email, but I’m sure I’ve missed at least a few techniques. What are you doing to sync the two platforms?
