Seven Steps to Integrating eNewsletters with Social Media

Does your newsletter help your social media? Or is social media helping your newsletter? Whether you’re sharing, connecting or promoting, the two go together like milk and cookies. Integrating enewsletters with social media is really quite simple and there are many ways to do it.

How does your newsletter help your social media?

According to a recent study published by eMarketer, 48% of marketers include “forward to a friend” features in their e-mails, but only 13% include features that make it easy to share content on social networks. If you’re still sending out your email newsletter as a PDF attachment, or heaven forbid, a picture within the body of the email, you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities for social media posts.

A good enewsletter will

• Give links to all your social profiles;
• Drive traffic to your website through republished blog posts;
• Give readers easy ways to share your articles/newsletter to their own social profiles;
• Help you identify key influencers (those who like and share your content).

How does social media help your newsletter?

According to Social Media Examiner, 63% of businesses say social media has a positive impact on growing their opt-in lists. Are you using your social network to encourage sign-ups? Talking about your enewsletter on social media can

• Drive awareness / extend the reach of your emails;
• Garner signups;
• Through reader sharing, drive even more awareness & sign ups;
• Elicit testimonials, i.e. “Great info here this week”;
• Provide content for the newsletter, i.e. through advanced search on Twitter, or simply articles you see in your own newsfeeds as you’re reading.

Seven Steps to Integrating eNewsletters with Social Media

1. Include links to all your social profiles in your template.
2. Include sharing buttons and forward to a friend buttons in your template.
3. Republish content from your blog in your newsletter (just some, not all of it, don’t be lazy).
4. Tweet out/post a signup reminder the week before or days before your newsletter is due.
5. Tweet out a link to the online version of your newsletter a couple of times after it is published. Try to vary the headlines or content you feature to attract different people.
6. Include a signup form in the app boxes on Facebook (and any other network you are able to). While researching this topic I came across the idea of including a link to my signup form in the links listed in my LinkedIn profile, and I made that addition instantly.
7. Include “click to tweet this” snippets in emails. This is something I see very rarely from small businesses and something I need to integrate into my own marketing.

Are there other tips out there I’ve missed? How do you integrate your eNewsletter with your social media? Share your thoughts in the comments.