Amp Up Your E-mail Marketing With Social Media

Grow your e-mail contact list

Just as you can use your outgoing e-mails as a way to advertise your social-network accounts, you can use social media to add subscribers to your e-mail contact list. A few easy ways to do this:

• Occasionally, ask your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn followers if they want to be on your e-mail list, and provide them with a link to your newsletter sign-up page. Keeping with good marketing practices, you want to keep straight pleas to join your list to a minimum. If all your updates to Facebook and Twitter say, "Sign up for my list," then you won't have many followers. Keep the pitches to a bare minimum, and let the content you post be your sales pitch.
• A good way to entice new sign-ups is to tease an upcoming issue of your newsletter a few days before it's sent. For example, if your monthly newsletter goes out on Thursday, post a quick headline or synopsis of the main article on Monday or Tuesday, and tell people that if they want the information, they'll have to sign up by Wednesday night to get this hot content.
• Similarly, you can post a snippet from one of your newsletter articles and tell your fans and followers that if they want to read the rest, they will have to sign up for your newsletter.
• You can embed a "Join My Mailing List" sign-up box on your Facebook Fan page, blog or just about any other site that allows embedded HTML code.

Extend the life of your content