19 Ways to Connect Social Media & Email Marketing Together

1. Link your Twitter URL to a brief overview of your company and a sign-up for more information.

This is fairly simple to do and probably performs better than sending people to the homepage. (This doesn’t hurt SEO because the URL is nofollowed anyhow.)

2. Create an Lead Capture Form on your Facebook Page.

This can be done using the Static FBML app on Facebook and works with practically all email marketing providers including Infusionsoft. One caveat of this, Facebook has planned to nix it soon, so be ready to try an alternative (probably pay to play if I was to guess).

3. Use Your Email Footer to link to your social media destinations.

This can be easily accomplished in some email applications like Infusionsoft, but it’s fairly easy to place simple hyperlinked text with “Follow us on Twitter,” “Like us on Facebook,” “Check out our Blog” and people will pretty much understand what you’re trying to do.

4. On Opt-In Success Pages, invite people to check out your Facebook, Twitter, Blog or YouTube.

These should be secondary to thanking and advising people to check their email for a confirmation link (if applicable). Often at this stage, people think, “Now what?” and social media destinations are the answer.

5. When people purchase your product or service, invite them to connect with you on social media for instant Q&A and feedback.

This is a great way to catch people in their euphoric state after a purchase and capture commentary from them. In addition, it enables you to provide help to them when they need it.

6. Consider shortening your email newsletter; provide shorter excerpts to hot content hosted on a blog and link to it with a Bit.ly link.

For the savvier crowd, they might copy, paste and share the link with their own audience. Make it simple for them to with a catchy title (even if it’s different than the landing page). An additional benefit from this is the visibility into the clicks, countries and other demographics of your link.

7. Make purchases go easier with Facebook Open Graph API.

Not for the faint of heart, but if you’re currently working with a developer on your site, ask them about offering a Facebook integration on your sign-up forms. Facebook allows websites to collect name, email, picture and birthday when users allow it through the Graph API.

8. Reference (and link to) customer quotes found across social media within your prospect marketing campaign.

We know testimonials probably earn more scrutiny lately, but with social media you can boost credibility by linking directly to a happy customers’ tweet or Facebook update. What’s cool about this, you’re rewarding your fans by helping them gain a little more exposure.

9. Implement the Facebook Like/Recommend button and the Tweetmeme Widget in your blog posts so you can measure the impact of what people think of your content.

Don’t forget to set the Facebook-specific Meta Tags on your site so Facebook properly attributes your site and description (details here). This will also serve as a great way to spread your content around through your visitors’ Facebook or Twitter feeds.

10. Publish a link to your newsletter on your Facebook, Twitter and Blog.

Place an opt-in above and below it so once people see your newsletter has got the chops, they will sign up to receive it next time. At the same time, the call to action to existing subscribers is to check their inboxes. Likewise, on a blog, it’s a good idea to ask people to subscribe so you you build your list organically no matter how people arrive there.

11. Link to a remarkable YouTube video.

While not necessarily a lifesaver by itself, sharing an insightful, inspiring and helpful video tells a lot about the personality of your business. Remember, you can’t embed a YouTube video itself into an email, so take a screenshot with the help of Jing and link it in your email and put a short description of why people should watch it.

12. Set your Facebook Page to default to a customized Static FBML tab.

This takes a little more work than simply placing a Lead Capture Form on a Facebook Page; however, some brands have reported exponentially higher response rates. This would be a great spot to have a Lead Capture Form in addition to your other social media destinations. (Learn how to do this…)

13. Feature your Fans in your newsletter.

Ask your fans across Facebook and Twitter how they like your product or service and feature (and respond) to their comments in your newsletter. This shows others that you’re genuinely interacting with them across social media and their feedback matters.

14. Leverage a Service like Ping.fm or Posterous to manage having a copy of your emails sent to users always available.

These services provide an private email address for widespread publishing. Not exactly ideal for truly conversational social media, but it’s an idea to get your message out there for SEO purposes.

15. Capture your Customers’ Social Media Profile.

There are two ways to this – voluntarily or involuntarily. To capture it involuntarily, you might want to use a CRM to allow people to enter their @Twitter name or Facebook URL. Obviously if you acquire it involuntarily, you need to be respectful of your customers privacy. Now, what you do with the data, it’s up to you – you can invite them to join your social media presence and segment the invite to whichever social networks they reside on. A service like Flowtown makes this cheap to do – about a nickle each and you also gather demographics about your people.

16. Publish a series of tutorial videos on YouTube, break them in smaller chunks.

Consider regularly publishing a series of how-to videos on YouTube in 3 minute segments. In the description invite people to sign up for similar tutorials like the one they’re watching. YouTube lets you link videos together with their editor, so link to the next one so you can “chain” them together.

17. Leverage Slideshare/DocStoc/Scribd for uploading and sharing presentations.

Hopefully this death by Powerpoint goes quickly by using these services because you can share simple concepts in a cool shareable embedded widget. If your presentation is interesting and useful, people will spread it around. As an additional benefit, you earn SEO and search engine visibility through uploading these presentations.

18. Produce quality content.

Probably the most important tip on this list — if you produce quality content you use it not only for your lead generation and brand building, you might even want to have it published by a larger audience (like a popular blog, newspaper or other email publisher).

19. Offer an attractive discount good for a limited time.

To qualify people for a discount, invite people to sign up to receive a valid coupon code to be used between a certain time. When you do this, offer a checkbox for people to elect to receive future special offers and discounts. (Permission, FTW!)