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Email Marketing Integration: What It Is & Why It Matters
Most digital marketing methods leave your results up to chance, at least to a certain extent. You can try your best to rank well in Google search results but at the end of the day, Google controls the search algorithm.
Email marketing is different. The people who love your brand or organization actually want to hear from you because they’ve given you a direct line of communication to their inbox.
Simply sending emails to your subscribers with an isolated email marketing strategy isn’t enough. With so many tools available, why not integrate your email marketing with your broader digital marketing strategy? By optimizing your email marketing integration strategy, you can make the most of your relationship with every subscriber.
Here’s why integration is so important and how to get it right.
What is email marketing integration and why should marketers care?
According to research from Smart Insights, email campaigns deliver an average open rate of about 20% along with a click-through rate of 3.3%. Social media marketing can’t even compare to email. Social media’s click-through rates are less than 1% most of the time.
In fact, 60% of marketers say email is already producing a solid ROI for their company while another 32% believe it will produce a return in the future.
Why is email marketing so effective? For one thing, 77% of people across all demographics prefer to hear from brands and organizations through email. It’s their favorite permission-based advertising as opposed to other options like Facebook.
But you can’t keep your email marketing strategy separate from the rest of your digital marketing methods. You need to integrate it with everything else.
Shoving a bunch of flour, eggs, oil, and sugar into your mouth isn’t going to taste like a cake, right? No, you need to put all the ingredients together in just the right way to get the result you want.
Better ROI than social media and other marketing methods
Email marketing in general delivers a staggeringly better ROI than social media advertising: $39.40 for every dollar spent on email compared to $12.90 for every dollar spent on social media.
No one is saying you need to ditch Facebook and Twitter to devote all of your effort and resources into email but email marketing integration can dramatically improve your impact, engagement, and ROI for both platforms.
You can deliver hyper-relevant content to your subscribers
By nature, email marketing is usually integrated with other platforms because plenty of email service providers have built relationships with platforms like Google Analytics and YouTube. For you, this means access to lots of relevant data about your subscribers: what they’re browsing online, which devices they use, age, and much more.
With this information, you can break your subscriber list up into different segments and design hyper-relevant emails that your subscribers are actually excited to open.
Amazing opportunities for analytics
Email marketing integration makes it easy for you to view and interpret your analytics across multiple platforms. You can see who’s opening your emails and clicking certain links. You can also cross reference that information with people visiting your site, their browsing activity on your page, and how they engage with your social media accounts.
Understanding what to do with that information can help you develop the most relevant and interesting emails possible for your subscribers.
Direct line of communication with your audience
There’s no way around it: If you aren’t collecting email addresses, you’re missing out on a reliable marketing opportunity. In email marketing, you don’t need to fight with unreliable algorithms that change on a daily basis.
Email marketing integration allows you to build a better relationship with your audience because email is a personal method of communication.
How you can take advantage of email marketing integration
Now that you understand the importance of email marketing integration, which tactics should you employ in your broader digital marketing strategy?
Social media
You have plenty of options for integrating social media into your email marketing strategy. One easy way is to include social share buttons at the bottom of your email campaigns. In fact, research shows that emails with social share buttons deliver a 158% higher click-through rate.
You can also use social media to attract new subscribers. A big goal for any marketer’s social media strategy should be to graduate their audience from the Facebook page and onto the website. One way to do this is to include a call-to-action on your Facebook page for followers to subscribe. If you’re going to pay to sponsor a post, create one that highlights your newsletter with a button to sign up. Not only that, but you can integrate data from social media into your email marketing strategy.
This email from Soylent makes it easy to connect with the brand on social media.
Source: Really Good Emails
Analytics
With so much data at your fingertips, you’re missing out if you don’t use it to inform your broader digital marketing strategy. If you’re one of the 17% of marketers who don’t bother tracking their email insights, you’re making a huge mistake.
Prioritizing email marketing integration with other data sources like Google Analytics will let you track which users open, click, and ultimately convert. You can also track which users don’t convert. This is crucial data for honing your campaigns, segmenting your subscribers, and developing relevant content for them.
Lead magnets
Integrating a lead magnet into your email marketing strategy is an excellent way to improve your subscription rates. Again, the real key here is to utilize other data to gain a thorough understanding of your audience. Maybe you’ll even want to create different lead magnets for different types of people.
Offering informational, relevant, unique, and interesting PDF files, checklists, eBooks, guides, and other documents, you can entice readers and followers into exchanging their email address for high-quality content.
There’s a bonus if you create multiple lead magnets for different segments of your audience: you can gain an understanding of a specific subscriber based on the lead magnet they signed up through. From there, you can send them hyper-relevant emails that are more likely to convert. It’s a win-win for everyone.
This subscriber likely received this email with a download link after providing her email address:
Source: Really Good Emails
Apps
If your company has the means and resources to develop an app, you should consider it. A dedicated app can make it easier for marketers to track data on subscribers to help deliver the most relevant content.
When it comes to email marketing integration, you could send emails that include coupons for downloading the app and unique offers for those who regularly use the app. You can also track products and items your subscribers view on the app and then send customized deals to them through email.
There are a lot of possibilities here.
This email from Rescue Time is personalized based on the subscriber’s app activity:
Source: Really Good Emails
Blog posts
One of the easiest ways to integrate your email marketing strategy with your website is through blog posts. Instead of begging your audience to make a purchase in your call-to-action, encourage them to sign up for emails. If they like the content they’ve already read, they’ll probably subscribe.
It’s usually easy to incorporate different widgets and minimally intrusive pop-ups that encourage readers to sign up. The most important thing here is to develop a CTA that fits with your audience and brand voice.
You could even create a few in-depth pieces of gated content that readers cannot access unless they provide their email address. This is a tactic a lot of big-name news organizations have employed in the digital era.
Thrive Market provides a non-intrusive way for readers to easily sign up.
Source: Thrive Market
Mobile devices
A whopping 58% of marketers surveyed admitted that they don’t design emails to render properly across different mobile devices.
This is a huge problem when you consider that almost 50% of emails are opened on a smartphone or tablet and nearly 70% of mobile users will delete an email if it doesn’t render properly. And you can forget about them opening your future emails.
On another note, you could also integrate your email marketing strategy with SMS push notifications or encourage readers to sign up for your WhatsApp or Telegram Channels. All these methods also encourage direct communication with your audience without the stress of intruding algorithms.
Wrap up
If you aren’t taking advantage of email marketing integration, your brand is missing out – big time.
Email marketing shouldn’t be considered an isolated event but rather part of your broader digital marketing strategy. You just need to decide what will work best for your brand and give some new tactics a shot.
With so many options available, you’re sure to find something that meshes well with your audience’s interests and the company’s goals.
