2022 is nearing its end. So much has happened this year, and significant ups and downs have touched the marketing world too.
As advertising gets fancier, email marketing may sound like an old-fashioned technique to wrestle with your competitors. Social media platforms are growing in popularity, making every new marketer think they’re probably wasting steam on crafting emails.
The surprising truth is that 37% of brands that know the power of email marketing are silently upping their budgets.
That should tell you something, right? But what if you didn’t have to choose between the two? You can build an unbeatable combo by integrating social media with email marketing.
Salesforce decided to combine these two approaches in its recent case study. Their results showed that email openers were 22% more likely to buy when approached through Facebook ads.
We’re firm believers in combining channels to maximize your marketing efforts. So, today we’ll talk about this particular combination while presenting you with 12 ways to integrate Facebook and email marketing.
Why should companies integrate Facebook and emails for better marketing?
Marketers are always chasing new customers, which often leads to forgetting their current ones. That’s leaving money on the table, so it’s time to fix it. But first, let us present three statistics you must know about your Facebook followers:
- They’re highly aware of your brand.
- Over 58% of people check their email first thing in the morning, while only 14% go straight for social media.
As Facebook’s engagement rates have taken a major fall, it’s wise to realize that only some of your Facebook followers will see your content. But you don’t have to lose them at this point. You can have them join your email list, where it’s easier to ensure your content reaches them, leading to extra exposure for your brand.
Why would you want to miss such an opportunity to convert highly interested leads? We’re making sure you don’t. So let’s start this journey of re-bonding with your Facebook followers.
1. Add an email opt-in form to your Facebook page
Facebook provides integration options so you can direct your followers to the proper form where they can sign up to receive your emails.
To activate this feature, simply navigate to:
Your Business Page → … (three dots) → Add Action Button → Choose “Sign up” Button > Enter link to your email list form
You can also follow the steps in this GIF.
Adding a sign-up button makes it easier for those followers who weren’t aware of your email list and even first-time visitors.
Now you can add a call to action in your upcoming posts to get people to sign up for your emails. Even if your content on Facebook doesn’t reach them constantly, your emails will.
2. Run a Facebook ad campaign promoting your email list
After adding the action button for people to subscribe to your email list, it’s time to promote it a bit more. Your best-performing Facebook posts are an excellent place to start.
Add a call to action for people to join your email list, then boost it. Or create a new advertising campaign focused on getting more sign-ups. By using Facebook’s targeting features, you can analyze your current subscribers and reach a similar audience with your campaigns.
Facebook ads are one of the best assets that marketers use mainly to sell to their audiences but rarely to add email list subscribers. Now, it’s time to leverage them for more sign-ups.
3. Offer exclusive content to email subscribers
It doesn’t make much sense for your followers to sign up to your email list if you’re sending content they can already access via your social media or website.
To get them to join your email list, you should offer a freebie or sequence of exclusive content they can’t find elsewhere. It should be an irresistible treat.
For instance, you can offer a Q&A via email each week or highlight industry content you’ve found interesting. You can also send case studies to help your potential customers understand how you approach projects and what you can achieve.
Some other types of freebies you can offer include:
- Worksheets/workbooks
- Short exclusive courses
- eBooks
- Quizzes
- Resources, etc.
4. Nurture Facebook subscribers with a good email campaign
Hopefully, soon after implementing some of these tips, you’ll start seeing new people subscribe daily. These are your guests, and you should welcome them properly.
Write a welcome email sequence explaining what they can expect from being part of your email list. You can even attach a short survey picking their brains on the type of content they’d like to receive. Hence, you can learn more about them and their preferences.
Templates are a great shortcut to creating engaging emails without starting from scratch. Encharge has compiled a fantastic list of templates for welcome emails. Or, if you want to learn more about lead nurturing campaigns, check out the guide on the topic.
A quick note: remember to use an email warmup tool to avoid ending up in the spam folders of your subscribers.
5. Integrate Facebook and email marketing platforms
Some email marketing services offer the option to integrate Facebook and manage your content, ads, and marketing campaigns. You can also import your subscribers as a custom audience into Facebook while running ads (see the next section)
This literal integration of your email marketing platform with Facebook makes it increasingly easy to spend less time producing content for both platforms and ensuring your promise across multiple channels stays the same.
You can A/B test ad copy via email before starting a paid campaign on Facebook. The open rate will tell you which copy is most effective. You’ll even be able to convert posts into emails and vice versa.
6. Sync your subscriber audience to your custom Facebook ad audience
Platforms like Encharge allow you to automatically send your email subscribers to your Facebook retargeting custom audience. Forget about manual imports.
With Encharge, you can sync a specific segment of email subscribers to a specific Facebook audience. As soon as a person enters that segment, Encharge will send it to Facebook, and Facebook will try to match their email with an email address in the Facebook user base. The person will start seeing your retargeting ads if the match is successful. Learn how to use this feature in Encharge.
This is an extremely powerful feature, as you can create precise segments in Encharge and automatically build hyper-targeted ads for your audiences. For example, you can run different ads for leads, trial accounts, and customers.
7. Promote your email newsletter in your Facebook cover photo
Users tend to follow visual clues over reading text. Since your cover photo is like a billboard that appears to all your Facebook visitors, there are better ways to use it than inserting a colorful branded image with no CTA. Why miss this opportunity to advertise your newsletter?
After adding your sign-up button (as mentioned in the first step), design a call to action for your cover photo.
The size is quite spacious enough to add guiding illustrations. This is likely to convert more visitors to subscribers.
8. Share Facebook community discussions via email
If you’re on Twitter, you’ve probably noticed how they send you a weekly email with highlights of the best-performing posts. You can do something similar with your Facebook content.
Send via email some of the juicy conversations taking place in your comments. Even better, if you have a Facebook group, you can send an email with Q&As or success stories shared by members. Recipients can then simply click a link to participate in the Facebook group directly.
Don’t get discouraged by your email open rates when you experiment with new content like this. Good results won’t appear immediately.
Also, use email verification tools to ensure your list is composed of real subscribers. Otherwise, you’ll end up with inaccurate email metrics, which can be unfairly discouraging.
9. Encourage subscribers to share your content on Facebook
Add a button at the end of your emails that allows your subscribers to share your content on Facebook.
Even though it has become pretty much a standard for email marketers, this is one of the most straightforward ways to integrate Facebook with emails.
Statistics from a survey conducted by OptinMonster showed that more than 57% of content-sharing activities were made via Facebook. This makes it the last option you’d want to neglect.
Almost any email marketing platform allows you to add this option as part of your email footer.
10. Promote your emails via contests on Facebook
Contests are still an excellent way to incentivize your customers to engage with your brand.
After choosing a valuable asset to give away (which can be one of the freebies we mentioned above), ask your followers to leave their email addresses upon entering the contest.
To set up your contest, you can use the Contest app provided by Facebook, which allows users to input their emails and join the contest safely.
There are a lot of approaches you can try. The point is to make it irresistible for your audience to participate.
Now that Facebook’s engagement and organic reach have declined, you might not see many participants enrolling in your contests. However, you can achieve optimal results if you advertise your contests by creating a new campaign or boosting your Facebook posts.
11. Advertise text-to-join for easy sign-ups
Another option to get more email subscribers via your Facebook content is by making it simpler than ever to join your email list.
Facebook pages like the one for the City of Miami Springs advertise text-to-join options as one of the easiest ways to join their mailing lists.
Statista says over 81% of Facebook users enter Facebook ONLY via their mobile devices. That’s a considerable audience standing there with their phones in their hands.
If they want to join your email list, they can easily shoot you a message.
12. Target your subscribers through Facebook ads
There’s nothing more annoying than low open rates. You spent so much time building your email list, but less than 20% of those subscribers open your emails.
Don’t get discouraged. Your email list is still an invaluable asset. You can reap its benefits even when subscribers don’t open your emails.
Simply retarget them via Facebook. (Just make sure you have asked for their permission to market to them via multiple channels.) As mentioned earlier, you can use Encharge’s Facebook integration to sync your subscriber list to your Facebook custom audiences automatically.
When you initiate a campaign to this list of users, Facebook will show your ad to those with a Facebook profile matched to those emails. This is a fantastic way to boost brand awareness, retarget those users, and increase sales.
13. Create an exclusive private group for email subscribers
We touched on Facebook groups above. Marketers who use Facebook for business know how valuable groups are for their content marketing strategies — especially private groups accessible only to a few.
Most marketers would create a group for customers who have purchased one of their products or are enrolled in their courses. But the lower the entry barrier is, the more likely you are to attract a large number of members.
In this case, you can add new members to your group in exchange for their email addresses, which requires zero investment. Through this approach, not only do you gain new email subscribers, but you also win highly interested potential customers in two channels.
You can engage with them both through new emails and through Facebook posts in the group, which will offer greater reach compared to simple posts from your profile. Plus, groups are a good source of quality user-generated content (UGC) for your campaigns.
Conclusion
Facebook is not dead. Regardless of what marketers say, the platform resembles a wise magician who smiles behind the curtains while the newbies perform because he knows how much they must learn to beat him. As long as you’re aware of this, you can benefit from Facebook.
Combine email marketing and Facebook to spread awareness about your brand and gain new subscribers. Before pouring money on new paid channels, invest some time to perfect your business page by redesigning your cover photo, integrating it with email, and announcing freebies for new subscribers.Most of the tips mentioned in this article cost nothing and can be implemented immediately (adding an action button to your Facebook page, a share button to your emails, syncing your retargeting audience, etc.). Combining them w
