In this article you will learn …
how to properly use social shares in email marketing
how to use newsletters for SEO
how to really welcome new subscribers
With an exciting subject line you can arouse the interest of the recipients in the inbox and optimize the opening rate of your newsletter. But how do you use e-mail to reach a group of users that goes beyond your own subscribers? With social email marketing and other little tricks, this can be achieved with little effort.
The goal of all of the approaches presented below is identical: increasing reach.
Your newsletter should be presented to the largest possible group of users and thus attract the interest of potential recipients.
Recommendations from existing subscribers, be it via social networks or by email, are particularly promising. You can also benefit from SEO effects if you make your newsletter accessible via a web version.
Share With Your Network Links
Social email marketing is the connection between the sending of newsletters and activities in social networks.
A typical use case are the so-called SWYN links (Share With Your Network) in an email. By clicking on the icon of a social network, the recipient has the option of sharing the newsletter in just a few simple steps.
Your email content spreads across the web without you having to take any action yourself.
The prerequisite for this is of course that your newsletter has a web version that can be called up via the browser.
Send sets with over 60 free social media icons are available for download.
You can then integrate the simple logos into your email layout and store them with a share function.
The more relevant and interesting your newsletter content is for the recipient, the more likely he is to want to share it with his contacts on Facebook, Twitter and Co.
Manual or automatic mail when sending newsletters
The concept of the SWYN links is based on the fact that your recipients consider your email content to be worth sharing. But of course you can also post a link to your e-mail to increase its reach. To do this, you simply share the URL of the web versions in the social media channels of your choice.
This can also be done automatically when sending via an interface between your newsletter software and social networks.
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Of course, you can still write the text for the post yourself.
The sitepackage: // newsletter system for example, specializes in social email marketing and offers this function as standard.
There are currently interfaces to
Facebook
Twitter
XING
Tumblr
LinkedIn
available.
Email marketing redirects
When one speaks of virality on the web, it is often synonymous with social media.
But your newsletters can not only be shared via SWYN links, but also forwarded by email.
The advantage here is a very sharp circle of recipients with little scatter loss. While content shared on Facebook and Co. often rushes through the timeline without being noticed, the email recipient has to actively deal with the message.
Events, invitations, news and discounts, i.e. content that impresses with relevance and added value, are particularly popular with forwarding according to a Litmus study .
It was also shown that the integration of SWYN links also promotes the forwarding rate by email.
Legal stumbling block Tell-a-Friend
Tell-a-friend functions enable the user to easily forward website content and newsletters to third parties using a form.
However, caution is advised when using it, as the function has often been classified as unauthorized advertising by courts in the past.
The decision is justified, for example, by the fact that the company usually appears as the sender at the recipient. However, the latter has not given any consent to receiving such advertising messages by email.
The situation is different if the email address of the user and not that of the company is the sender of the message.
If you want to use Tell-a-Friend to increase the reach of your newsletter in a legally secure manner, you should definitely find out about the necessary requirements in advance.
Search engine optimization through newsletters
The web version of your newsletter is also content that can be found on the web.
The most important prerequisite for this is that the newsletter is indexed in the search engines and the search robots can follow the links it contains.
Because it is placed in the search engine results, you make your newsletter accessible to a group of users that goes far beyond your subscribers.
By assigning individual metadata such as page title and description, you can further increase the search engine suitability of your e-mail.
Professional newsletter software provides these functions when creating the e-mail. Of course, you should also take search engine optimization into account when writing the message by using important keywords (which you should define beforehand in a keyword research ) in the headings and the body text and creating added value through internal and external links.
Texts should not be caught in images, as these cannot be read by search robots.
There is also the risk that the images in the recipient’s e-mail client will not be loaded directly and the message will be lost.
Newsletter archive on the website
Another way of making your newsletter content accessible to potential subscribers and thus increasing the reach of the e-mail campaign is to make it available on your own website.
You can present past issues in a newsletter archive.
For this purpose, the content is briefly summarized in a marker, the complete e-mail can then be called up via the web version of the issue.
If your website visitors find your mailings interesting and useful, they will opt for a subscription. By providing and indexing high-quality content, the newsletter archive also has a positive effect on search engine optimization, as the size of your website grows.
Welcome edition for new subscribers
The more subscribers your mailing list has, the higher the potential viral reach.
The constant expansion of the distribution list is therefore a particularly important goal in email marketing.
For this purpose, you should specifically refer to your newsletter.
The most important place for the placement is of course your own website.
Layers or conspicuous calls to action in the visible area of the page are particularly promising. However, references to the distribution list in the e-mail signature, in social networks, in advertisements or advertising material such as flyers and business cards as well as at trade fairs arouse the interest of new subscribers.
In any case, you should refrain from buying addresses. The quality of these contacts is often poor and legal certainty regarding consent is questionable.
You should then greet new subscribers with a welcome edition, because at the time of registration, the interest in the news is particularly high.
If you don’t want to create a separate welcome campaign, you can also automatically send the last regular newsletter to the new subscribers.
In this way, the content is made accessible to a new group of users with little effort.
