Email and social media must work together - Forrester

A Forrester report released on 13 May 2010 pushes the thought that email marketers must integrate social media into their campaigns to stay relevant to consumers.

Forrester says that such integration will create new opportunities for email list growth, extend campaign reach, and harness social insights to inform targeting.

The process of integrating email with social media should be more than sporadic coordination of campaigns.

With prospects and customers interacting with companies and brands largely on their own terms, marketers will achieve better results through the integration of their communications and channels. That's the overarching message in the Forrester report that was produced by research executive, Shar VanBoskirk .

In her report, “How to Integrate Email with Social Media”, VanBoskirk points to some significant benefits of tightly aligning email and social media, including better open, click-through and conversion rates; better email list growth; and increased campaign reach and influence through viral activity.

VanBoskirk advises marketers to adopt three specific tactics for integrating marketing efforts across email and social media:

1. Drive email subscriptions within your social media presence: place email registration boxes, or links to your email registration page, on your company blog, discussion forum or Facebook page. When you do this, people can sign up for this contact as they become more engaged with your brand.

2. Encourage subscribers to share email content: apparently, very recent Forrester research is finding that people are now beginning to share email content with friends via social sharing tools. The suggestion is that we should support this trend and benefit from it by not only placing "share with a friend" icons and links in your email, but at the top of your email layout.

3. Leverage social media content for more relevant emails: as with all campaigns, relevancy is what prompts engagement and response. Forrester urges marketers to increase the attractiveness of emails by incorporating user-generated content from social media presence.