Using Email To Drive B2B Social Media

Posted on December 16, 2010 by Greg No Comments

Yes, we’re all using social media to disseminate increasing amounts of information. According to a recent Marketing Sherpa study, 78% of companies are participating on company-branded social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) and more than 50% of us are also sharing multimedia content, blogging, and using Twitter.

Email remains an evergreen catalyst for driving B2B social media

Remember, email was the birthplace of the share this phenomena that has become a cornerstone of social media. For better, or worse, it’s still easy to forward an email to a person, or a group of people. While social media is very effective in sharing information with many people, simultaneously, email is still able to deliver with a high amount of personalization, automation, and effectiveness. What’s more, modern email marketing reporting is detailed and provides helpful quantitative insights on how our customers and prospects are interacting with our communications.

Segmenting your email marketing list will help you with more targeted content

Chances are that you will have different sets of email subscribers who interact with your email campaigns in differing ways. For example, you will notice that one segment of your list tends to share more: forwarding the email, clicking on social media sharing, etc. This is valuable information that helps you send out differing messages that appeal to recipients’ behavior.

…Marketers who use a combination of segmentation and content targeting reap far greater revenue and net profit gains over marketers who fail to embrace segmentation. -Forrester Research

Keep using email in your marketing mix. Use it to drive interaction with your other marketing initiatives, especially social media and offline “real world” events. Use this checklist:

Does your email have a clear call to action?
Are you making it easy to share nuggets of information in your email on social channels?
Is your email personalized?
Is email part of your B2B mobile marketing plan?
Are you A/B testing different types of emails to different customer/prospect segments?
Are you steering clear of common email campaign SNAFUs?

My opinion is that email marketing can be an especially important link for driving highly qualified, relevant traffic to your B2B social media marketing channels. Good luck, and please share some of your experiences.