The Amazing Similarities Between Email Marketing and Social Media Marketing

Neal Schaffer: 0:02

Welcome to another edition of social business unplugged practical advice on how to best leverage social media for your business. Now, the host of social business unplugged, author of the forthcoming book, maximize your social published by Wiley and founder of maximize social business. Neal Schaffer. Greetings everybody and welcome to a another episode of social business unplugged Neal Schaffer. I was actually in Phoenix, Arizona last week back home here in Orange County right now in California, but had a really great week at the Infusion Soft University. And I want to talk about some aha moments that I have there when we were talking about best practices with email marketing. And obviously, email marketing goes beyond just email to include digital marketing, social media search paperclip, we really covered a wide range of topics. It reminded me of how important certain concepts were in marketing in general, and therefore I wanted to talk about how those apply obviously to the social media that you're all interested in. Now Infusionsoft. I'm not here to sort of promote what that software does. But I have personally from when they'll networking gone, and now with maximize social business, obviously, have gone from constant contact to MailChimp to Infusionsoft, I often get asked why Infusionsoft, it's obviously a lot more expensive. And there are other great software programs out there. I'd say Infusionsoft. They are really targeting small businesses of which I am one. And I think HubSpot is probably the most similar one that's out there in terms of an email marketing slash marketing automation software. So if you are interested, feel free to ping me separately. I don't want to spend this podcast talking about Infusionsoft. But it was a four day university there in the suburbs of Phoenix at Chandler out of Arizona, where I was at their headquarters, just learning a great deal and networking with a lot of great small business owners that are trying to do what I'm trying to do, right. So like minded business people. But it was interesting, because what's happening in the world of email marketing, is that the old days of just blasting a message out and it getting into the inboxes of people are obviously gone. We know that email providers are getting better at filtering out spam. Recently, Yahoo said, if you've had a dormant account for six months, we're going to clean it up. So immediately, Infusionsoft contacted all of its subscribers saying, Hey, if you have Yahoo mail addresses that have been dormant over six months, chances are you're going to get dinged for spam if you tried to send them an email. And they were very proactive in making sure those email addresses were deleted from our list. But it goes beyond that. We all know what Gmail or what Google has done recently, of putting up these separate promotion and social tabs, really trying to protect our inbox. But really what happens is every list that is out there has a reputation that is attached to it, brands have reputations. We have social media reputations, right? Well, lists are the same. And when the email goes out from your list all across the world, it's being seen by Internet service providers, you know, it could be Cox, which I have is the local cable company, it could be at&t, there's obviously a lot of different providers out there. But the providers are trying to deliver good service to their customers trying to keep the spam out. And obviously Google is an email service provider that's also trying to do the same thing. So what happens is, if you send out a lot of emails, and a lot of those emails get reported for spam, it's going to make Infusionsoft look bad and Infusionsoft as well as the constant context of what we're trying to prevent that right. And they're trying to make you realize that your list has a reputation attached to it. And the higher that reputation is, in other words, the more relevant that content is to your audience that you send out to, the fewer notices of spam you get, the more clicks you get within your emails. So the more engagement you have within those emails, the better relationships you have, you know, it's about engagement, relevance, and relationships, right? The more deliverable those emails are going to come. And at the end of the day, you're going to be more successful in whatever your email marketing objectives are. It's very interesting, because the same concepts of relevance engagement, well relationship as well comes down to, you know, one of the things that undoubtedly goes into how search engines index web pages as well, let's say you blog, and let's say people come to your blog, but they don't spend a lot of time on your blog, your blog, or your particular blog posts have a very, very high bounce rate. People come and they immediately leave, they don't click on any links, they don't stay on your site and go to other pages. You have a low engagement, and you've probably built out content that may not be as relevant for that target audience at the start. Chances are bringing in. In other words, from a search engine perspective, you would rather introduce content that is more engaging, more relevant, and therefore, people are staying on your page longer. There's more click throughs, and what have you, and perhaps more comments and social shares. But that opens up a completely different subject. But it really comes down to that same notion of engagement. Is your content engaging or people engaging with it? Whether it's a share a link that's clicked or even a comment? And is it relevant? are they sticking around, you know, checking out your site for other pages? What have you. So I think that's the best practice not only in email marketing, those concepts of relevance and engagement, but also even in the world of search engine optimization for your content. Well, what about social media? Well, social media is really almost the exact same thing, right? I mean, think about Facebook, think about the way that what used to be called EdgeRank, which now is divided into 10,000 different things, but what we know of what Facebook has announced, but you know, Facebook has a similar algorithm that used to be called EdgeRank, doesn't matter what its name is now. But the more engaging your content is, the more people show to right, it's really as simple as that. So you need to create content that's relevant. And that's something that people engage with. And you need to ask people to engage with it sometimes. That's why, you know, Dan, Zarrella HubSpot, the social media scientist has put together a lot of data, something I tweeted out today, it was actually from a blog post from the the folks over a buffer. But you know, tweets that asked for a retweet actually performed better than tweets that don't, for instance, right, you have a call to action there, it's more engaging. Now, Twitter doesn't have an algorithm, like Facebook, LinkedIn definitely has something going on. If you look at your, you know, recent updates, or if you're a company page administrator, and you look at the number of impressions and how your page posts are doing, you know, there's a lot of spam out there. When it comes to email. There's a lot of bad content out there with companies that are just creating content for the sake of creating content, hoping to build backlinks, what have you. There's also a lot of bad social media marketing out there, right? There's a lot of automation, people sending out 300 tweets a day, 24 hours, and what have you. And at the end of the day, there's a need to filter that face. Because it's filter, I believe LinkedIn is building that filter, right? Google Plus, they're sharing very popular posts, whether you follow these people or not, they're introducing them into your stream. So they're trying to build engagement in the stream. But at the end of the day, for these social networking sites to survive, because one of the primary forms of revenue that they get or generate is from advertising, they need to make sure that your content is engaging, or they're only showing engaging content. So really the theme of today, and like I said, this was the aha moment from a email marketing, training, in essence, but it comes down to creating engaging content and engaging with others. And from that, creating relationships, obviously, the deeper relationships you have with your readers, with your followers, the more engagement you're going to get right. And obviously, you know, as you build relationships, your content probably over time becomes even more relevant as you further understand what your target audience is thinking and and what your fans are thinking because you're engaging with them more often. So engagement, relationships, relevance, these are really broad terms that sometimes people overuse or overgeneralize. But really, we're starting to see that this is affecting our email marketing, or SEO, and definitely, especially on Facebook, or social media marketing. So just things to take into account. This podcast covers a lot of different topics. Some are more tactical, this is more conceptual. So maybe it's you know, taking a step back, looking at your social media strategy, looking at what you do on a daily basis, your workflow, and really putting this this relevance this engagement, this relationship filter on what you do, and are you doing enough. And if you're not, there's some, you know, easy tactical things you can do. You know, reach out more to your Twitter followers that retweet your content, reach out more to your Facebook fans that like your posts, there's no lack of things you can do to try to build up that engagement. Take a data driven approach, look at your tweets, and you know, Facebook posts that have been more viral than others and try to replicate that look at blog posts, look at keywords that search engines are bringing to your site, look at your blog posts that have done more successful than others. And, you know, within the data, there's a lot of clues as to how we can be creating more relevant content and obviously through that, generating more engagement and building more relationships. So that's it for today. I hope wherever you are in the world, you've enjoyed the podcast. We'll be back at you a week later. Thank you again for all of your comments and ratings on iTunes, every single one is appreciated. I also want to let you know that in September 30. My new book on how to create a social media strategy maximize your social is coming out. And now I do have a sneak preview of this book which I'm giving away for free. You can find it on Mac Is my social business.com At the very top there's a banner or go to maximize social business.com/m Y S dash O P t dash i n. That's it for today. Everybody. Have a great week, and we'll talk to you again. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to another edition of social business unplugged. We appreciate your subscribing to our podcast and adding your rating and comments in iTunes. If you would like to appear on this podcast or have content that you would like covered, please contact Neal Schaffer Neal at maximize social business.com for additional social media for business advice. Please make sure to check out your new social media for business resource at maximize social business.com Thanks again and make it a great day.