5 Ways Brands Can Use Social And Email Together To Surprise And Delight

Kayla Voigt
Buffer Stories
Published in
7 min readNov 1, 2016

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Social media is a great way to get people interested and excited about your company, product, and services — and share a few great cat GIFs along the way. But social media, while a great channel for brand awareness, customer support, and content promotion, can be difficult to bring customers further down the funnel. Especially in the B2B world, it’s unlikely a prospect sees your latest tweet and immediately hits purchase.

Enter: email. Email is a great way to engage on a personal, 1:1 level with your subscribers. Once someone opts-in to your email campaigns and newsletters, you can begin to nurture them to the point of sale, whether that’s with a great sale offer or a personal outreach. Email’s powerful 38-to-1 ROI can help seal the deal.

While social media and email are both great channels for marketers to achieve their goals, they work even better together. Here’s how:

Build Your Audience

If you have an active and thriving subscriber base, email can be the perfect channel to build further social engagement and turn your subscribers into brand advocates.

1. Include social icons in your emails

76% of marketers already include social media icons in emails, according to MarketingProfs. Generally, those icons are placed at the bottom of the email as part of the signature:

While it’s great to include social icons in your email as a way to drive followers or virality, you should take it one step further. Like any call-to-action (CTA), you need to make it clear to your subscribers what you’re asking them to do. Why should they follow you? What kind of content do you post? Why click?

Another option outside of the signature is to include those share buttons more prominently. This works well for newsletters or other content-based email promotions, like this one from Tasting Table:

In this example, this is the lead content right below the fold, with more content as you scroll down. Offering the option for folks to share each article directly, even if they haven’t read your entire email, may be one way to increase social engagement.

Just remember to keep the goal of your campaign in mind. Are these icons distracting from your main CTA, or can you leverage them to grow your audience?

2. Run a social-focused email campaign

Maybe you’re about to host a Twitter chat or are about to launch a huge product. Your subscribers will want to join in the fun! Promote your branded hashtag, social contest, Facebook Live event, or other social media initiatives within an email to help build your audience and encourage further subscriber engagement.

This example from Forever 21 promotes an upcoming Instagram hashtag challenge, which is a fun way to engage your Instagram audience:

Here’s another example where Moda Operandi showcases top followers and influencers with a collection of their clothes as worn by real people, with a CTA to shop the styles and follow on Instagram.

Of course, rather than a general campaign like the two examples above, you can add a little incentive for your social sharing with a contest. Social media contests can boost engagement (and drive leads!) from your followers, and what better place than email to make sure everyone knows about it. This example from Madewell shows off their brand new product and includes a CTA to start Instagramming for a chance to win it.

Generate Excitement

3. Build up anticipation for upcoming events

Social in email can help build excitement for your next big event or campaign. Every year for The Email Design Conference, we send out a save-the-date email. But this year, we decided to add an air of mystery: we wouldn’t reveal the third city where our conference would take place until we had received 500 guesses through social media from our Litmus Community.

See the full email code in Litmus Builder.

Our guesses were all over the map!

Our guesses were all over the map!
And people were SUPER excited to participate.

We included a share tracker within the email and the opportunity for our subscribers to keep checking the email as more and more guesses came in. We expected it to take 3–4 hours for the city to be revealed, so we were blown away when we hit our mark of 500 tweets 90 minutes after hitting send!

We didn’t just get great reach with this (500,000 impressions) but saw a bump of ~3% in followers that day, too (For us, that means 600 people!). Not all of our subscribers were following us on Twitter, so it was a great way to bring the audiences closer to alignment.

4. Make it easy to share about your new features and products

When there’s something new and exciting to share, it’s likely your subscribers will be excited, too. While you may alert them via email, they’ll likely want to share via social, rather than forward to a friend. Make it as easy as possible to generate that excitement and spread the word, either through social icons (as we’ve shown above) or through social-focused email campaigns.

Your call-to-action (CTA) is a powerful tool. If you want people to share, tell them! Make it the primary CTA for your email and bump your social icons up from a footnote to somewhere prominent. Alternatively, you can create a specific viral campaign.

This example from Toad & Co. actively asks for viral engagement, and offers a nice incentive: $20 off! When you click on the “HOOKUP NOW” CTA, you’re taken to a specific landing page to get the code — and invite your friends.

Another way to show off new products and features is to showcase your influencers and their social handles. For instance, in retail, using prominent fashion bloggers to show off your new clothes is a great way to leverage influencers. Not only because it uses your products, but because it seems more authentic — it’s not a canned, catalog shot.

Banana Republic shows off a variety of fashion bloggers featuring their new pieces and includes their Instagram handle.

Encourage Engagement With Gamification

5. Run a giveaway contest

For The Email Design Conference, we also wanted to one-up ourselves for the tickets on sale email. To drive increased engagement (and ticket sales) we decided to build out a hunt for golden tickets via email.

To find the golden tickets, subscribers needed to hunt in our code for challenges ranging from ALT text to a hidden image hover effect. Then, they simply had to tweet us their answer with the #LitmusLive hashtag. To make sure that folks from all over the world could enjoy our game, we extended it over two days by hiding the challenges until the designated time and then choosing the winners randomly from tweets. We alerted our followers with the winner and the next clue at various intervals.

To do this, we used an app called Zapier to feed tweets with our event-specific hashtag #LitmusLive into a Google spreadsheet, where we could then randomize, check for accuracy, and “draw” the winner.

We added more than 200 followers and saw more than 1,500 tweets in 48 hours. Our subscribers and followers dropped everything to play.

Talk about engagement! On top of that, we saw huge increases in click through rate, open rate, and reading duration, as our subscribers opened the email again and again to see what the next clue would be.

How will you leverage social and email?

When it comes to using email and social together, get creative! Brainstorm new ways to engage your audience and tie the two channels together. Doing so will provide a more cohesive brand experience and journey for your followers and your subscribers — and start to turn more of them into customers.

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Small town girl looking for adventure in the great wide somewhere. Writer. Eater. Traveler.