Over the years, email marketing has remained one of the most effective techniques for mobilising contacts. However, on its own, email marketing may not really be as successful a marketing strategy as one would expect. Instead of using it as a standalone tool, why not integrate email campaigns with other marketing methods? As long as the integration is properly done, your overall marketing strategy is likely to find more success than just having your various methods work apart from each other.

So how exactly will you integrate your email campaigns with your other marketing methods? Here are some suggestions:

Integrate email and social media

A growing number of studies are showing that an integration of email strategies with social media lead to much better results. And it’s not really hard to do. All you have to do is add social sharing buttons to you emails, send emails based on social media insights and grow your email list through social media.

When your emails have sharing and follow buttons, your reach will go beyond what’s in your email list. Should you learn that some of your subscribers have mentioned your company on Facebook or Twitter, you have enough insight to send targeted emails to these people and turn them into conversions. And since you’re on social media, you are going to pick up followers along the way, all of whom could be added to your email list.

Integrate email with your blog

Encouraging people to subscribe to your blog is part of the work you have to do for it, but we recommend emphasizing that an email subscription would be much more convenient for them. Sure, RSS feeds are just as useful, but nothing beats the convenience of actually getting an email notification every single time new content gets published. More email subscriptions means not just more blog traffic, but also more potential leads for you.

Once these email subscribers are in, it would be great if you can write welcome emails for them to show that you really appreciate their having subscribed to your blog. That welcome email is just one of the first steps you have to take to maintain these subscriptions and nurture them into leads. While they’re not sales-ready leads just yet, your blog subscribers are more likely convert into leads later on as they get notified via email about more and more free blog content over time. Their likelihood of eventually converting will also be boosted because of all the great blog content you’ve been providing them.

Make your email marketing strategy mobile

With the number of mobile users growing by the day, it only makes sense to make sure that all your emails are optimised for mobile. To make sure that they are, you should test all your email templates to see how they look on tablets and smartphones. Whatever calls-to-action (CTAs) you have in your email, make sure the buttons and links are clickable on touch screens. Your emails should also have both plain text and HTML versions. Even if the images in your email won’t correctly display, make sure they get what the image is about by using descriptive alt text under them. Finally, to make it easier for mobile users to fill out their information, optimise the landing pages and forms that your email links to.

Integrate email with analytics

Since marketing today now goes beyond your website’s boundaries, individual analytics are no longer enough for your email, site, social media and other marketing channels. However, a multi-channel view offers you a glimpse into how the people in your email list are doing as far as their experience of your email campaign is concerned.

The cross-channel questions that can be answered by marketing analytics data include the number of clickthroughs that didn’t convert, if there are email contacts that would be better nurtured through social nurturing or which email contacts convert into customers at a faster rate. With integrated, closed-loop marketing analytics, you can get deeper insights into what the people in your mailing list actually want. That, plus the fact that it can help you gauge how effective your marketing strategy is in general. Best of all, integrated, closed-loop marketing analytics also give you data that could help enhance your email targeting.

Hopefully, the tips given above for the integration of your email campaigns with your other methods will help you achieve your marketing goals.