Five reasons why Email Marketing and Social Media are best buddies for boosting your marketing budget ROI

A marketing campaign will always bring the best return on investment when it’s part of an holistic cross-platform strategy. If you’re creating content for one, there just isn’t any reason not to repurpose it for another.

Social media posts, images and gifs can work well as snippets in email content. Email content can work well as a blog post and blog posts can easily be turned into advertorials and editorials.

But there are two platforms that really do go hand-in-hand when it comes to driving a good return on your marketing efforts: email marketing and social media.

Case Study: The Replace Base

An online retailer of mobile device repairs and replacement parts

Here are five reasons why email marketing and social media are best buddies for boosting your marketing budget ROI

An accessible strategy for businesses of all sizes

Social media and email marketing are both very accessible marketing strategies for any size of business. Put simply, they are quick, and mostly free and easy when you know how.

There are some great free email marketing tools out there that allow something simple with branding on it to be compiled in less than an hour to send a message to your audience. You just need some good quality images to represent your product or services, and to think of some interesting content ideas. Within emails you can link to your social accounts too.

Read our tips on how to stop your emails being treated as spam.

Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter are also free. Again, you just need some images and something interesting to say to get started. Most email marketing platforms will generate a URL to your last campaign so that you can share it on social media, or even add it to your website as a landing page.

Email marketing ROI is among the best, social media CPC is pretty good too

Given that it’s free to send an email (apart from your software subscription) and the time spent creating email content can be minimal, the ROI you’ll get from your budget can be phenomenal. As an agency, we charge around £195 for an HTML template, which can be re-used. If you have a healthy data list of customers or potential customers, say, 1000 people, and you get a decent open rate of around 25% that gives you 250 people opening your content each time. If your click through rate (CTR) is 10% then that’s 25 people, and if 5 of them buy something at any point, your average sale only needs to be £80 to get a 200% ROI - seems rather achievable!

The cost per click (CPC) of social ads is very low – we’re talking pennies in some cases. Add in the ability to capture remarketing data from people landing on your site from your social campaigns, and you can see how easily your spend can start driving your customers and site visitors into a marketing cycle that’ll boost their engagement with your brand, and in time, their spend too.

Email and social create a really warm customer experience

Social media is perfect for sharing behind the scenes content to help customers get to know your brand and your team better. It’s also a great place to invite them into your email marketing lists by encouraging subscriptions for offers or content. Once they’re in your email marketing list, you can nurture them through their own personalised buyer journey based on their likes and preferences, their actions and their purchases (ask us about our Marketing Automation platform). You can personalise emails with customer names and reference to their favourite products and create date-based marketing offers such as on their birthday, or customer anniversary.

Both platforms allow you to learn a lot more about your audience

Social accounts and email software both allow you to gather valuable insight into who your prospects really are, and what they like outside of your business. Depending on their privacy settings, you can learn more about where they live, what they watch on TV: you can even find out the time of day that they’re most active and the dynamics of their family – whether they're parents for example. You can use all this information to adapt your marketing messages and help you find new audiences with similar customer profiles.

Email and social media marketing allow for automated content

Social media and email marketing can both work on auto-pilot while your office is shut, as your team sleeps, or while you’re dipping your toes in the salty seas of warmer climates. After some groundwork setting up the automation tools and responses, your customers can be communicated with based on different triggers. Your social content can be scheduled in advance, and you can set up messenger bots to contact your customers and reply to FAQs. Your email marketing triggers will make sure your customers are being contacted as soon as it’s appropriate, and your social ads will pop up when they’re next online, remarketing the content of the emails they’ve recently opened. So, as your team gets busier and busier processing sales, your marketing activity can grow with it to keep driving those orders.

If you’d like to know more about our Marketing Automation Tools, Social Media Management or Email Marketing services, do get in touch, you’ll be surprised how far your budget could take your brand with our team’s expertise.