5 ways to tie in Twitter with your e-mail newsletter

There’s no avoiding social media today, although to be honest (grandma aside) who really wants to? The additional platform that it provides as a means of spreading brand awareness and engaging with customers on both an intimate and mass level is hugely appealing and widely recognized.

Nowadays, it’s a given that some form of social media is incorporated into a company’s overall marketing strategy, and the vast majority are reaping the benefits through increased direct sales, online sales, brand exposure and reputation management.

Over the past few years, marketers have looked to integrate their email newsletters with social media and today, it’s fairly standard practice to include social media links in newsletters and links to your latest newsletters posted on your different social media profiles. But what more can be done?

With Twitter essentially covering both B2B and B2C bases, let’s investigate further how you can tie in your email newsletter with this social medium.

Here’s what you can do:

• What personal information do you ask for when subscribers first sign up for your newsletter? Name, surname and email address, right? How about asking them for their Twitter name? That way you can follow them on their preferred social network and hopefully (if you’re posting interesting, relevant and funny content) they’ll follow you back.
• The fact is people won’t sign up to your newsletter if they don’t know about it. You certainly don’t want to go overboard with self-promotion, but by all means let your followers know about your (awesome) newsletter and tell them a bit about it. Why is it so great? What interesting things can they expect to read? What are the benefits to them? At this stage it’s not a bad idea to include a link to your previous newsletters or archives so that they can see what you have to offer.
• If a follower RT’s the link to your online newsletter or one of your articles then be sure to thank them for it (newbies – check your mentions). It takes no time at all and they’ll realize that you appreciate the gesture. Remember that they don’t have to RT anything of yours, so consider it a privilege if they do, because it means that they like something of yours so much that they are willing to share it with others.
• Use the opportunity of the ever popular #FF (Follow Friday) to let your followers know about your new signups, it might help give them a good boost, especially if they are new to Twitter.
• Have specials or competitions that are only available to those subscribers who follow you on Twitter. An easy example that has worked well is to get your subscribers to RT a particular phrase with a link to your newsletter sign up page (or whatever landing page you’d like). Of course the prize has to be worth tweeting about. You don’t need to go all out, but don’t ask subscribers to take the time to do this and then reward them with a R50 book voucher.

When all is said and done, perhaps the most important thing of all is to listen to what your audience is tweeting about – and then use that information to your advantage. Whether they are praising or complaining, asking questions or offering answers, get involved in the conversation, because it’s often these trending Twitter topics that makes for unique, humorous, engaging and thoughtful newsletter content.