5 Ways To Use Your Email Newsletter To Encourage Online Engagement

Your email newsletter is one of the simplest ways to directly engage with your current and potential customers. Think about the results you’re getting from your current campaign—are you making the most of it and nurturing brand loyalty?

Returning customers can be some of your best online advertisements, acting as ambassadors for your brand — according to Nielsen, people are 4 times as likely to buy when they’ve been referred by a friend.

One thing you can do to nurture your existing customer base and appeal to new customers is to use your email newsletter to encourage social media engagement. Here are 5 ways to leverage your email newsletter and subscriber list to encourage interactions with your brand on social media.

1. Include smarter than average social media call-outs in your emails.

One of the first things you should do to integrate social media into your email newsletter is to add social media buttons to your emails. By including social media buttons, you not only put the idea in their heads—you make it incredibly easy for them to follow through. Otherwise, they might not think to seek your page out on their own.

76% of branded emails include social buttons, and that’s likely because it’s very simple to do so. One of the simplest ways to do this is to include hard-to-miss social follow buttons at the end of your newsletter, like in this example from Yoga Journal:

You can even get more creative with it, like in this example from a Starbucks email campaign. The brand launched a promotional campaign called Project Give Good that also included its own hashtag, #Givegood, and they gave recipients a super simple chance to follow along:

If you’re not giving your subscribers a clear opportunity to find and follow your brand on social, or to share content you’ve put in your email newsletter, you’re definitely missing out.

2. Repurpose visual content from social media.

You often hear of the importance of visuals in marketing, and it’s true. Visual cues help us retain information better than simple text.
And, if you’ve already worked hard creating beautiful visuals for a platform like Instagram, you can reuse them to make your email newsletter more visually interesting. Don’t forget to add catchy captions to grab attention.

Instagram is one of the most powerful social platforms for marketers, thanks to its high rate of engagement. According to Hootsuite, top brands see more 120 times the amount of follower engagement on Instagram than they do on Twitter. But for some reason, only 14% of brands use social images to optimize their email campaigns.
By including these images in your campaign, you can encourage your subscribers to click through to like a specific post or follow your account.

3. Offer a contest or giveaway.

Another way to get your email subscribers to interact with your brand on social is to offer some obvious value that following your brand provides. For example, Fruit of the Loom offered the chance to win a “product of your choice” by liking their page on Facebook.

And keep it simple—focusing on just one social network at a time, rather than all of your social profiles at once, puts less pressure on your subscribers. They have the easy option to simply follow your page or not, meaning their decision-making process is much easier.

4. Follow your subscribers on social.

Following your subscribers is a simple way to try and increase your follower ratio, because at least some are likely to follow your page back. In fact, 95% of adults age 18-34 are likely to follow a brand on social media.
In order to follow them, simply upload your subscriber list to various social platforms, which will scan it and locate the profiles you’d want to follow based on the email addresses you have.

5. Run Facebook and Twitter retargeting ads.

Finally, don’t forget about the power of advertising. Retargeting ads work by making sure you’re not aiming your ads at just anybody—you’re targeting people who have already shown interest in your brand.

There are different tools to use for Facebook retargeting ads, and ads.twitter.com works great for Twitter. By only running ads to subscribers you know have shown intent and/or interest, such as by clicking on your email, your ads are more likely to have a solid email marketing ROI.

Your email newsletter is more powerful than you think. Use your subscriber list to increase social engagement with your brand, and you’re bound to see growth in no time.