Social share: Integrating your social & email marketing

Are you one of the many Graphicmail users who diligently follow the links to our blog that we post on Twitter and Facebook? If you are, you may have already seen the blog article about the online revolution. If not, it’s worth checking out as is this video which contains some social media statistics that you may find interesting. It’s becoming more obvious every day that email is recognized as the top performing direct and online marketing channel so, it makes sense that combining email and social media is going to have a massive impact and to help with this we have released a new way to compliment them both.

Social share

This tool lets you publish your email newsletter straight to your Twitter account.  The newsletter title together with a link to your full newsletter will then automatically appear as a tweet – with no manual intervention form you!
As Twitter each Tweet to 140 characters, you will be delighted to hear that The Graphicmail Development Team have created another helpful gadget called GMtiny which is our very own URL abbreviator – it shortens your newsletter link, reducing that overlong and unsightly URL to just a few characters. How handy is that? 

Not content with that, we have already begun work to extend this feature so that you will be able to publish across even more social networks. Next one; Facebook! Keep watching, we’ll notify you when this happens.
But, if you’re not already involved, don’t wait for that, start now by using our new social share tool to enhance your brand exposure online. Expand your subscriber audience and give your sales a boost by engaging more fully with these potential customers.

And, don’t forget – Graphicmail is also on Facebook and Twitter. Go there now, be a friend and follow us. We really enjoy reading about what our followers are doing.

Whilst you’re at it, check out the Graphicmail tools which you can use to insert social widgets in your footer – then, after your newsletter goes, check the social widget statistics section in your reports.

Why should you integrate your email with social media

For those of you still unaware or unconvinced about the benefits of Social Media, here’s a really good article by Chris Moerdyk of BizCommunity reviewing Erik Qualman’s book; Socialnomics. Chris does an excellent job of summarising many of the important aspects regarding the development of  social media, some of which will maybe make you consider, as they did me………………..

If Facebook gets more traffic every week in the US than Google - and YouTube has become the second largest online search engine, then it’s more likely that your customers will locate the product they are seeking on a social site like Facebook or YouTube than they will on Google. Which begs the question………..” What happens if they can’t find your product when they are searching their social media? ”

Social media is the online version of what has traditionally been referred to as ‘word-of-mouth’ : Qualman states that, “whilst 78% of consumers trust recommendations from their peers, only 14% place their trust in advertisements”. So what happens when your peers aren’t recommending you through their new word-of-mouth (social media)?

Social search has grown to become the new online phenomenon: Search engines are now giving preference to companies based on their social mentions.  In Qualman’s opinion we will not, in future search for products or services as they will find us using social media.

But how does this link with email marketing?
Graphicmail have for some time now, been providing a variety of ways to integrate your email marketing with social media because we want to help you and your business to be prepared for each new wave of online expansion.  Last year we provided social widgets for your email footer, allowing your subscribers to share your newsletters through their social network accounts. Now we’ve added a new social widget reporting tool allowing you to track those who shared what  with who and through which network they shared it.  Finally, we released our new social share feature in our newsletter