How Twitter & Email Marketing Work Together

Many small businesses understand they need to get on the "social media bandwagon" but you might not know how to start, or better yet, why to even do it. You just hear about social media and think, "My business needs a Facebook presence and a Twitter account" but you don't really know why. If you're reading this blog, chances are you've got a website and you're probably email marketing. So you might be asking, "If I'm already doing email marketing, how does Twitter fit in?"

We'll today, I'm uncovering ways for you to use Twitter and how it could benefit your email marketing campaigns, as well as how your email marketing campaigns benefit your Twitter followers.

Ready, Set, Email, Twitter!

For the newbies: Twitter is a free social networking service that enables its users to send and read messages known as "tweets" that are no more than 140 characters long.

Get Started

Many of you might just be starting out on Twitter. What do you twitter about? Who reads your tweets? Many businesses set up a Twitter account, and write about new things that are happening in their business, what's going on in the industry, or they retweet articles they might find interesting. So how might this work together with your email marketing campaigns?

Get Followers 

You may have people that visit your site or location that aren't on your email list but they  might be if they knew all of the cool stuff or the "Email Only" offers you publish in your emails. So in order to get more followers you'll want to post your Twitter handle on your site, in your email marketing campaigns, on your business card, and in your email signature so that people can easily click on your link and follow you. For instance mine is: http://twitter.com/janinepopick or @janinepopick. Then start to track the number of followers you get.

Email + Twitter = A Perfect Match

Now, here are a few things you can do to combine your Twitter presence with your email marketing campaigns.

Twitter Your Subject Line - Now that you've created your email you sent it out to your  lists, take your subject line, which is hopefully less than 140 characters, and twitter it, then included a link to your hosted version of your email campaign. You'll likely be reaching part of an audience you never knew you could have. If they like your content they'll click through and read it, then they may even sign up to your list.

Think About Search on Twitter - Depending on the way people search for things on  Twitter and the content of your subject line, (check out the free service called TweetDeck that enables you to search and filter on keywords), people that never knew anything about you might see your tweets. 

One example would be a winery might be having a sale on their wines, and anyone that might search on "wine" using a tool like TweetDeck, would be exposed to any tweets that include the word "wine". This is a great way to get even more eyeballs on your tweets and ultimately your email marketing campaigns.

Include "Follow" Links in Your Email Marketing Campaigns - Make sure you include a "Follow Us on Twitter" link in all of your email campaigns. With the velocity at which emails get forwarded, a newcomer might want to "try you on for size" by following you on Twitter before making the commitment to join your email list.

Get Them to Sign Up - You may also consider adding a "Sign Up to Receive Our Emails" link so that those coming to the hosted version of your email for the first time from Twitter have a place to add themselves to your email list. Entice them to sign up by having "Email Only" offers or notices.

Use Twitter for Research - If you use free twitter tools that help shorten your links like http://bit.ly/ & http://tr.im/ (remember your entire tweet is limited to 140 characters) you can track how many people click on links that you include in your tweets. Then you can see which articles, offers or stories that you twitter about should be included and above the fold on your email newsletter.

If you've got any ideas for how you're using Twitter with your email campaigns we'd love to hear them!

Comments

[Eric]

We have used much of this strategy to spread the word about how we generate leads for our media partners. We use a content heavy website in conjuction with local radio advertising to attract small businesses to our site www.areasbestbusinesses.com. Much of our traffic does come from our twitter and facebook efforts.

[wbw_Jeff]

Pushing a status update by link-
You can include a link in your email in this format:

http://twitter.com?status=url encoded description of your hosted version + shortened URL

And it will take your readers right to their Twitter page with a Tweet about you already to go, they can edit or submit as they please.

For help on URL encoding visit:
http://netzreport.googlepages.com/online_tool_for_url_en_decoding.html

Or for an example of how it works you can visit my hosted version at WhosBloggingWhat.com It is implemented halfway down the page after the 'Social Media' block.

Has anyone else done this? I've been testing various methods to get more clicks.