The most effective and impactful marketing always comes from ecosystems. Just as coral reefs and rainforests are home to numerous species working together to help each other thrive, your email, social media, and website should be part of an interconnected system.
We can certainly appreciate the burning love that some marketers feel for one specific channel or another, but they’ll never be able to single-handedly help your business thrive.
After all, there’d be no reefs in this world if coral polyps were on their own.
Thankfully, these tiny creatures have zooplankton to eat, which gives them the energy to create massive structures like the Great Barrier Reef. The coral polyps, in turn, are eaten by butterfly fish, which are eaten by reef sharks. The reef functions like one big family that helps each other shine (though they sometimes also become each other’s dinner).
In this guide, we’ll look at 7 ways that you can use email and social media to not only connect to your website but to drive serious traffic to it. Whether you provide B2B services, operate a bakery, or are an institution of higher learning, it’s imperative that you give each of these various channels serious attention. Working together, they can elevate your business to new heights (a rising reef lifts all polyps).
It’s impossible for a car to drive somewhere if there isn’t a road. Similarly, your email recipients and social followers won't know where to go from your emails and social posts if you don’t include a clear CTA (call to action) that directs them to your site.
This might sound obvious, but you’d be shocked by how many businesses put content out into the world with no CTA. It just sits there like a nameless blob. Not only does this type of content prevent engagement in the near term, but it actually hurts your chances of future engagement as well because it’s so clumsy that your followers might lose trust in your brand.
Avoid this issue by creating clear and compelling CTAs that make your audience want to visit your website. As a rule of thumb, good CTAs should make sense even if they were the only thing someone reads.
If there’s anything worse than not having a CTA, it’s making a claim in your CTA and then failing to deliver for the customer. You’ve probably heard of this phenomenon referred to as a “bait and switch.” When asking someone to visit your website, you’d better make it worth their while. And make sure the value is readily apparent once they click through from the email or social post.
You can further propel your content ecosystem by making the content on your website shareable. For example, if you’re directing people to a landing page that showcases your latest product launch, you could make assets from that page shareable. That way, interested people could post those assets on their social media pages or email them to friends.
You can increase your followers’ engagement by establishing your brand as a premier voice within your industry because it’s always easier to attract web traffic when you’re viewed as a thought leader. How do you do this? Here are 5 tips to help you get started:
Identify your area of expertise
Survey others in your industry to learn their biggest pain points
Develop a handful of unique solutions to these pain points
Find effective ways to share your ideas
Keep looking for new opportunities to develop your content
Thought leadership can truly be the fuel that propels all your various marketing channels. Just be sure to carve out time to continually research your industry and conjure up new ideas that will be of use to your followers.
The old approach to marketing was to cast the widest net possible. A big reason for this was that businesses lacked the data and technology to target the right people at the right time. So they just tossed out generic campaigns, trusting that they’d inevitably reach some of their intended audience.
Thankfully, you now have the ability to segment your email list and social media followers for maximum impact. By delivering the most relevant messages possible, you can get more engagement for your website.
For example, let’s say that you recently updated the FAQ section of your site. You could look at the record of all customers who have called your customer service team in the past 12 months and then use email and social media to let them know about the new answers and solutions that are available. Your email could give examples of the best answers from the website in order to encourage them to visit the site themselves.
As for social media, you could look at the regions of the country where the most customer service calls are coming from and then run geographically targeted social ads promoting your FAQ section.
Targeting your content is an essential step toward improving your marketing ecosystem, and personalization is how you can take it to an even higher level. It lets your recipients know that you not only know who they are but also want to speak to them in the most relevant way possible.
Personalization builds trust in your brand and increases the chances that people will want to interact with your other online channels. So a subject line that addresses the recipient by name or a social post that is tailored to the recipient’s precise needs will always have a stronger possibility of driving traffic to your website.
Your brand should shine through regardless of which channel someone engages with. This means that your emails and social posts need to match the voice and design of your website. There should be no doubt about who owns these channels and what they offer your followers.
Consistency also extends to your content cadences. You should post to your social channels on the same days and at the same time. Not sure what time to do it? Use analytics to find the prime windows of time within the week. A similar approach will help you establish a reliable schedule for your emails.
While consistency is important, it’s effective to sometimes throw a curveball at your followers. A great way to do this is to announce a giveaway. There are probably hundreds of contests going on right now within your industry, so you’d better make sure the prizes are legitimately impressive.
You could promote the contest via email and social, then drive traffic to a page on your website where followers would submit their entries. You can also consider adding another action to the process, such as watching a quick video promoting a new business feature or some other noteworthy business update. In this way, you’re making your website a relevant part of the contest experience rather than having it just serve as the entry submission device.
Perhaps you could even offer additional entries for those who share the contest on their social pages or email the link to their friends. In this way, you’ll keep the engagement going and strengthen your entire ecosystem.
If you’ve already found a handful of effective ways to drive traffic to your website, congratulations. But what are you going to do today to ensure that this success continues tomorrow? Your customers need to feel that they’re getting fresh content and new strategies in order to give you sustained engagement.
Fortunately, you can use A/B testing to identify your most powerful building blocks for future campaigns. These split tests will help you write better subject lines, make your post captions more eye-catching, and create CTAs that emphasize the “action.”
Your data will also help you identify your most impactful social platforms. There’s no reason for your brand to have an active presence on every channel out there. Find out where your core audience spends their time and then focus your efforts there. If you’re wasting time posting on the proverbial “MySpaces” of the world, you’ll never be efficient and impactful enough to truly stand out in your industry.
When your multi-channel approach is working effectively, you’ll drive traffic from one channel to another. When it’s working beautifully, your followers will consistently engage with multiple touch points throughout your content ecosystem. As long as the content is high-value and there are CTAs present, it’s possible.
Our team of experts at Twilio SendGrid is standing by to help you get the highest performance from your email campaigns. Whether you’re automating an extensive drip campaign or composing custom messages for a select few customers, we can help you get better results with less effort.
Click here to sign up for your free Twilio SendGrid account. Powered by our platform, you can ensure that email is one of the strongest channels within your brand’s ecosystem.
