Social media and email marketing are two of the most powerful channels at a marketer’s disposal. According to The State of Email Report, both email marketing and social media were ranked among the top three most effective channels for marketers.
While email and social media are fundamentally different channels, each serves a unique purpose. Email excels in bottom-of-funnel activities such as retention, transactions, and advocacy. On the other hand, social media shines in facilitating instant, community-driven communications, raising awareness, and nurturing consideration during the buying phase.
At the same time, there is certainly an overlap between what the two channels offer—and finding that sweet spot of cross-channel integration is what marketers should aim for.
In this blog, we’ll explore 16 strategies to bridge the gap between social media and email marketing. By leveraging these powerhouse channels, you can deliver a more cohesive brand experience and significantly improve your overall marketing effectiveness.
- Which is more effective: social media or email marketing?
- The dynamic duo: Integrating social media with your email marketing strategy
- How to grow your email list using your social channels
- How to grow your social following using your email list
- Include social icons in your email
- Send an email explicitly promoting your social channels
- Promote a social contest
- Use share-with-your-network links to make sharing easy
- Encourage followers to tag you on social media
- Include it in a welcome series
- Offer social as an alternative to unengaged subscribers
- Embed a dynamic social feed into your email
- Cross-channel campaigns
Which is more effective: social media or email marketing?
This is a common question among marketers who are evaluating the best ways to communicate with their customers and prospects. We’re not here to take sides (though we’re admittedly partial to email!), but consider this insight from Marigold’s 2024 Global Consumer Trends Index:
50% of consumers have made a purchase from an email in the last year, compared to 48% for social media advertisements, 43% for social media posts, 24% for SMS/MMS messages, and 21% for banner advertisements.
Rather than an arbitrary debate about which channel is “better,” instead we should be asking, “How can we harness the strengths of each channel and make them work together more effectively?” This approach allows us to bridge the gap and enhance the overall impact of our marketing strategies.
The dynamic duo: Integrating social media with your email marketing strategy
Email and social media can mutually benefit each other’s effectiveness in several ways:
- Using your social audience to grow your email list.
- Using your email list to grow your social following.
- Running a cross-channel campaign.
Let’s dive into each of these tactics to understand how they can be implemented.
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How to grow your email list using your social channels
If people show interest in your brand on social channels, chances are they might be interested in your emails as well. Think about ways you can make your followers aware of your email newsletter while making it easy for them to sign up.
Here are six list-growing strategies to explore for your social channels:
- Promote your newsletter regularly to your social audience
- Incentivize newsletter sign-ups with exclusive promotions
- Tease email-specific happenings
- Highlight past email happenings
- Add it to your bio or brand profile
- Running paid ads
1) Promote your newsletter regularly to your social audience
Do your fans and followers even know that you have a newsletter? They might not. Reminding your followers and fans about your newsletter and providing a link to a signup page is the first and simplest step for turning fans on social media into email subscribers.
Think about how you can work this into your social calendar on a regular cadence, whether that’s once a month or once a quarter.
We took this approach with the goal of increasing net new subscribers across our email program, which contains a variety newsletters.
“After a year of promoting Litmus newsletters on our organic social channels, a sizable 40.7% of those who signed up were net new subscribers.” —Tracie Pang, Email Marketing Manager at Litmus
Consider emphasizing the variety of your newsletter offerings, whether that’s in your “link in bio” tool in your Instagram bio or a landing page you created specifically for your company profile page.
If you offer multiple newsletters, showcasing the range can inform your current followers about your other offerings. They might even be interested in subscribing to more of your newsletters!
“Promoting your newsletters on your social channels can help with cross-pollination: subscribers who are already opted into one newsletter could opt in for others if they already like your brand.” —Tracie Pang, Email Marketing Manager at Litmus
If you prefer to focus on a specific newsletter, adopting its tone of voice in your promotional content and copywriting can give potential subscribers a preview of what to expect.
The friendly and playful tone of Litmus Weekly inspired our approach to crafting visuals and imagery tailored specifically for promoting this newsletter.
And if appropriate, tapping into trends like memes can be fruitful, too!
2) Incentivize newsletter sign-ups with exclusive promotions
Do you offer exclusive promotions and discounts in your newsletter? Make sure to highlight that in your messaging on social. According to StoryDoc, it’s the top reason why people subscribe to a newsletter.
- Receive discounts: 39%
- Read current news: 21%
- Learn about something of interest: 18%
- Get access to exclusive content: 16%
- Receive product announcements/updates: 5%
Escape Brooklyn regularly incentivizes their Instagram followers to subscribe to their newsletter on Substack for exclusive monthly promotions.
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When you do this, it’s important to clearly articulate the benefit of signing up. Create attention by:
- Giving a preview of the kind of content subscribers can expect from your newsletter
- Offering signup incentives (for example, access to exclusive content or discount)
- Giving previews of email-only deals or discounts
Bare Holidays taps into this tactic on X (formerly Twitter):
Sign up to our newsletter here!! Enjoy exclusive discount codes and holiday offers direct to your inbox. >>>> https://t.co/MLcnlmKoc9 pic.twitter.com/sr86ughKIk
— Bare Holidays
(@bareholidays) February 4, 2024
You can also offer promotional codes for newsletter signups, like presale codes for an upcoming event, performance, or show:
NEW SHOW: Ms. Lauryn Hill brings the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill Special 25th Anniversary Performance to #TheOrion on December 6
For an exclusive presale code & early ticket access, sign up for The Orion’s newsletter at https://t.co/K9YKlUy4QH
— The Orion Amphitheater (@TheOrionAmp) October 11, 2023
You could also make your offer more inviting by offering a special promotion for those who subscribe through social media—for instance, a 20% discount for your Instagram followers instead of the usual 10% from your website’s newsletter pop-up.
Alternatively, if you prefer to lean into intrigue, consider teasing the offer without revealing the full details. Let prospects know that the full amount will only be disclosed after they sign up. Then, maintain the excitement with a fun reveal (such as an email scratch-off). The possibilities are endless!
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3) Tease email-specific happenings
You can also use your social channels to give a sneak peek of upcoming issues of your newsletter, like The Telegraph does on X for their Front Page newsletter:
The front page of tomorrow’s Daily Telegraph:
‘PM refuses to back under-fire Met chief’#TomorrowsPapersToday
Sign up for the Front Page newsletterhttps://t.co/x8AV4Oomry pic.twitter.com/KD2U3KVqCM
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) April 21, 2024
Got a new product or big announcement coming down the pike? Capitalize on this moment by encouraging followers to subscribe to your newsletter so they’re the first to know when the time comes.
Something’s coming to Litmus this week…
— Litmus (@litmusapp) April 3, 2023
For the Email Excellence Awards, we created a virtual voting booth exclusive to Litmus Weekly subscribers. Because voting was only possible through the newsletter, we let our social audience know that the only way to participate in voting was my subscribing.
First, we put the announcement out on our social channels:
#EmailGeeks! This year’s #EmailExcellenceAwards rely on a little help from you.
Help us pick the winners of the Best Email Design categories by casting your vote! Here’s how:
1⃣ Subscribe to #LitmusWeekly
2⃣ Check your inbox this Thursday (November 10th)
3⃣ Vote!(1/2) pic.twitter.com/1Cek8fEVCF
e
— Litmus (@litmusapp) November 7, 2022
Then, the voting took place (powered by a live poll made with Litmus Personalize):
You can also leverage a contest, competition, or giveaway you’re hosting—like Dash Water does here.
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4) Highlight past email happenings
Don’t stop talking about your newsletter once you hit “send”! Aside from teasing your newsletter, you can also recap it to your social audience. Highlight any specific developments, with language that encourages your followers to sign up so they don’t miss out on the next newsletter you send.
We finally figured out time travel at Litmus.
In today’s edition of Litmus Weekly, we took our subscribers back in time. No joke.
Missed out? Don’t worry, our time machine is still up and running.
— Litmus (@litmusapp) April 1, 2021
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5) Add it to your bio
This one’s an easy win: simply add a link to your newsletter signup on your social media profile bios, like The Wall Street Journal does on X:
You can also contextualize the value of signing up for your brand’s newsletter, like The Marketing Millennials does on Instagram:
6) Running paid social ads
Running paid ads on your social channels to drive sign-ups for your newsletter can be a highly effective strategy.
Consider what works best for your brand or industry: B2C brands might consider Instagram, while B2B brands might consider LinkedIn.
Here’s one we ran on LinkedIn to promote our newsletter:
You can also lean into testimonials for ad creative—after getting approval from a subscriber who gave praise to our newsletter on X, we turned it into an ad to leverage social proof:
It doesn’t have to be complicated, either. In fact, we found that simply using our newsletter’s logo was the most effective creative in this ad set.
One solution, endless possibilities.
Litmus Personalize makes it easy to engage subscribers with powerful 1:1 experiences, from Instagram feeds, scratch-offs, live polls, and more. Don’t take our word for it: our customers have seen +96% average increase in email-generated revenue.
How to grow your social following using your email list
Conversely, if your subscribers enjoy your email content, chances are they’ll find your social content engaging! Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Include social icons in your email
- Send an email explicitly promoting your social channels
- Promote a social contest
- Use share-with-your-network links to make sharing easy
- Encourage followers to tag you on social media
- Include it in a welcome series
- Embed a dynamic social feed into your email
1) Include social icons in your email
One of the most popular ways to make your subscribers aware of your additional channels is by adding icons and links to your social profiles. In most cases, marketers place social icons at the very top or the very bottom of an email.
Figma has their social media icons in their email footer:
Including social icons in your email is easy to implement—and that’s probably the main reason why 76% of all email marketers are using this technique already. However, it’s important to consider whether it’s the right choice for your campaign.
Rather than including a list of social media icons in your email, you should let subscribers know the value of what they can expect from your social media channels. For example, saying something like “See what happens behind the scenes” followed by the TikTok icon or “Get daily news updates” followed by the LinkedIn icon. —Jaina Mistry, Director, Brand and Content Marketing at Litmus
Reflect on your email campaign strategy and take a good look at your goals to decide whether including social media icons will support these objectives or if they might distract from your main call-to-action (CTA).
If you decide to include them, try enticing subscribers with social proof, like Epic Gardening does here by displaying the number of followers they have on each channel:
2) Send an email explicitly promoting your social channels
Perhaps you’re launching an awareness campaign, using social media followers as a key performance indicator (KPI). If that’s the case, you might consider sending an email dedicated to explicitly promoting your social channels—like Fractel does here:
Something to consider is how engaged your audience is. To ensure your message doesn’t fall flat, it might only be worth sending to only your most active subscribers (e.g. anyone who has opened an email in the past week) or new subscribers who are just getting familiar with your brand (e.g. part of a welcome series—which we cover in greater detail below!) Segmentation is key!
3) Promote a social contest
Are you running a giveaway or contest on your organic social channel? Use this opportunity to shine a light on your social channels!
This approach makes it very clear to your subscribers why they should engage with another channel: they have a chance to win something—and the prospect of receiving something for free is a powerful motivator for action.
Boroux drives awareness to a contest they’re hosting in a dedicated email send, outlining each step clearly:
4) Use share-with-your-network links to make sharing easy
Share-with-your-network (SWYN) links enable your subscribers to share content directly from your email. Whether you want them to share the entire newsletter or just specific details, SWYN links seamlessly transition subscribers into the social channel’s interface, allowing them to share content with just a single click.
Here’s an example in Litmus Experience, a newsletter dedicated to promoting our upcoming in-person and virtual events. When subscribers clicked each icon, they were taken to a pre-populated message that could be customized and shared within seconds:
Here’s what a pre-populated post looks like on LinkedIn—notice how the metaimage from the URL is pulled in!
And here’s what it looks like on X:
Down to Earth Farmers Markets does the same in their monthly newsletter, with Facebook and X linked as options to share.
How to generate SWYN links: use a service like Click to Tweet or Share Link Generator to easily create a URL that unfolds into share link. Note, only X supports a pre-populated message; X and Facebook only support URLs.
5) Encourage followers to tag you on social media
Social proof builds brand trust, and it’s one of the most coveted forms of validation. Encouraging your followers to tag your brand on social media is can help you do just that!
Jules Acree’s newsletter includes a module with email copy that asks subscribers to screenshot and share their favorite part of her newsletter as an Instagram story.
If you’re a retail brand, consider including a CTA in your email footer to tag your brand, like Feners does for Instagram and Pinterest.
6) Include it in a welcome series
If a follower has recently subscribed to your newsletter, they might still be familiarizing themselves with your brand. This is the perfect time to send an email that promotes your social channels, ideally as part of your welcome series or even your onboarding emails.
Contextualize it in your email copy, like Outdoorplay does here: “Welcome to the first step on the path less traveled – adventure begins here. From inspiration to your next expedition to the biggest and best sales, follow Outdoorplay on socials to see our gear in action.”
7) Offer social as an alternative to unengaged subscribers
Social media can also play a role in your reengagement campaigns. For example, Habitat offers Facebook as an alternative channel to subscribers who aren’t engaging with their emails anymore.
Habitat embraces a fact that many email marketers don’t like to accept: email might not be the perfect channel for everybody. However, instead of just letting an unengaged subscriber go—and losing the connection altogether—they offer Facebook as an alternative to stay in touch.
You can also consider adding CTAs to your opt-out confirmation page as a way of keeping communication lines open with a former email subscriber.
8) Embed a dynamic social feed into your email
Do you have a carefully curated and designed Instagram feed? Email is the perfect place to showcase your Instagram content—like StrangeLove does here:
With the right solution, you can set up an Instagram feed in your email in just a matter of clicks. (Of course, Litmus Personalize is our pick!) It’s a great way to show the content that you curated on social to a new audience and entice them to follow.
Plus, it requires no coding experience to use! Our collection of quick-start templates were designed to keep things simple for anyone using Litmus Personalize, be it an email developer, designer, or marketer.
Here’s how easy it is to get started:
Cross-channel campaigns
So far, we’ve primarily covered how to use social media to promote email signups, and vice versa, encouraging folks to engage across both channels by leaving . Let’s take things a step further by looking at campaigns that take a more integrated, cross-channel approach.
1) Boost web traffic by way of social proof
Some brands can use social media as a pulse check to gauge product popularity and interest. For instance, a retail brand like can highlight its “most-liked” social media posts to subscribers. This provides social proof, drives website traffic, and encourages prospects to purchase.
Another way to accomplish this is with social feed counters. With Litmus Personalize, you can display the most up-to-date “like” count for social posts, like Boux Avenue does at the bottom of the email:
Source: Litmus’ Guide to Live Polls and Social Proof
2) Run a dedicated campaign
You might also consider sending an email to announce a comprehensive, integrated campaign. For example, Yoga Alliance uses this approach for their #AllForYoga initiative, which has a two-pronged strategy. First, they encourage subscribers to complete a survey and follow them on social media. Then, they invite participation using the campaign hashtags #AllForYoga and #WeAreYogaStrong.
Harness the strengths of each channel
Ultimately, both email and social media provide powerful ways for brands to connect with their audiences. While they might initially seem like competitors, their distinct roles in the marketing funnel—social media at the top and email in the middle to bottom—make them complementary.
By coordinating an omnichannel strategy across email, social media, sales, and product teams, brands can help deliver a seamless experience at every customer touchpoint. How will you break down these silos and connect the dots?
Resources to learn more:
One solution, endless possibilities.
Litmus Personalize makes it easy to engage subscribers with powerful 1:1 experiences, from Instagram feeds, scratch-offs, live polls, and more. Don’t take our word for it: our customers have seen +96% average increase in email-generated revenue.
Originally published by Bettina Specht.
The post Better Together: 16 Ways to Integrate Social Media with Email in Marketing appeared first on Litmus.
