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Written by: Econnexx
Social media is one of the most effective methods of attracting new prospects to your firm or business. Email marketing is one of the most effective means of nurturing prospects to become customers/clients of your brand.
In this post we analyse both forms of marketing activity. We will demonstrate how to automate your marketing using emails and effective social media engagement. We will demonstrate how to merge both activities together to create a campaign that generates clients, sales and revenue on a daily basis through attracting, converting and closing your ideal prospects cost effectively.
Social media in conjunction with email marketing provides businesses with huge potential for reaching and acquiring new customers. However over 90% of businesses that commence marketing in both these areas give up or fail. In this article, we will explore some of the most cost effective ways of tapping into the world's largest pool of contacts to attract and convert these free contacts into customers.
Firstly let's look at each marketing activity in its own right:
Social Media Marketing
Social media provides businesses with huge potential for reaching and acquiring new customers. It is not only an important element of how we now communicate in the modern digital age, it is also the biggest opportunity for businesses who want to achieve growth at a significantly lower cost than traditional marketing. In order to get an idea of the marketing potential and the number of contacts available through social media channels, it is important to firstly understand the size of these modern day market place's.
Below are up to date social media user numbers for 4 of the largest social media channels as of September 2015:
As you can see the user numbers are huge, however, this should not be the reason for you using or adapting one channel over the other. The channels you decide to market through, should be based on your ability to reach your target market / target persona and the cost effectiveness of each in generating you the results you need.
For example, we know that more affluent users prefer LinkedIn, and also if you are a professional service provider your engagement rate will be higher, Instagram has a young market, but over recent months this has been changing, twitter users are loyal and rely heavily on their chosen channel for info, news and updates, and facebook, has a high usage, something that can be useful for increasing brand awareness.
There are 3 main ways to generate customers on social media.
Paid marketing / advertising is using the advertising platform of a particular social media channel to attract your target market and convert them to purchasing your product or services. The success of this form of advertising varies across sectors and indeed channels. From our experience, we find this to be more successful when selling products rather than services.
Personal engagement with your target market, we find to be the most successful form of generating sales for service related business, such as financial services, accountancy services and recruitment services, but personal engagement from the head of Walmart or Tesco is less likely to increase sales.
Paid remarketing , is displaying advertisements to those that have previously visited your site and demonstrated interest in your product or service. Remarketing is very efficient at increasing your brand awareness, and converting a larger proportion of your target market whether generated via previously paid advertising campaigns or personal engagement. From our experience, Facebook is a fantastic platform for nurturing contacts via remarketing. Generating contact information through site visits our social team will load contacts into a facebook remarketing campaign, should these visitors have a facebook account, our media will be displayed when they visit facebook to reaffirm the brand we are marketing, increasing exposure and conversions.
Email Marketing
Our goal for all clients, whether product or service orientated, is to generate and increase sales. However, only a very small percentage of those that initially engage with your brand will buy, therefore it is crucual to acquire their contact details when they engage with you, to enable you to convert a larger proportion of contacts via an ongoing marketing process, the most effective of which is by delivering messages via emails.
For product related businesses, sending regular emails demonstrating the value of that product will be effective. For services related companies, personal engagement, and demonstrating expertise and authority as well as value in the service will be required to maximise conversions.
For product related businesses emails from the company brand will be adequate, but for services related companies, personalised emails from the partner, Managing Director (people of position in the business) are going to be more effective.
There are 4 reasons well-organised email campaigns are successful:
1. Low cost: Using emails to market is very cost effective. Excluding the creativity and design that must be applied to email content, the fact that an interested party subscribes and gives you authority to market further to them, demonstrates a huge potential for conversion.
2. Measurable ROI: Marketing is only effective if it creates a return on investment. Many believe that to market at all requires a huge budget. Our approach at econnexx is to generate client sales using the most cost effective methods of marketing available, then increase the commitment to more advanced strategies, when marketing becomes self-funding. This lowers risk for the client and ourselves. Larger marketing campaigns then become self-funding based on the lessons learned and success gained from previous smaller campaigns.
3. Personalisation: When you gather information from subscribers, you can automatically personalise their greetings and emails. If you wish to send personalised emails for an appointment or sales visit, you can use their first name or full name when addressing them.
4. Automation: Finally the biggest opportunity and reason for the success of email marketing is the ability to automate an engagement process with your contacts immediately after the point of them registering for information on your product or service. With 80% of sales occurring after the 5th time of asking, automating this process to send non-intrusive but information based sales requests, will dramatically increase conversions.
Once you begin establishing followers and connections, tools such as direct messages on twitter and Inmail messages on Linkedin provide you with the ability to strike up personal relationships with your social audience.
It is through these channels where you can establish a real interest in your service. By being personal and sending download links to useful brochures and offers relating to your company / brand, or sending a personal invite to join your email newsletter, those who see value will happily opt in and provide their contact details to receive the information you offer.