For the sake of discussion, I’m going to assume you’ve heard of Facebook. But just so we’re all clear, it’s a “social networking service and website” (to quote Wikipedia) that connects people to their friends, family members, co-workers, etc. for the purposes of sharing information about their daily lives.

But can it really help your email marketing program? Of course! Here are a couple of tactics for using Facebook to enhance your email marketing program – and vice versa. This post is part 1 of 2. More tactics will be posted this time next week.

Email sign-up forms in your business’s page
This is low-hanging fruit. If you have a Facebook page for your business, incorporate a sign-up form for your email marketing program into the page. Some email software providers (ESPs) have a means for users to build the form directly into your page. Otherwise, link to it from your welcome tab.

By doing this, you’ve converted a Facebook fan into an email subscriber and have an additional channel by which to communicate with them.

Make your email messages shareable
You’ve created a fantastic email campaign and want to enable your recipients to share this message on Facebook. (You’ll first need to create content that your recipients will want to share. What’s considered shareworthy will vary from sender to sender, and even recipient to recipient. That’s an entirely separate posting, but here’s a link with concepts for sharing B-to-B content. Some of the ideas could apply to B-to-C as well.)

To be able to share your content or message on Facebook, you need to use the share URL that Facebook has created. By doing this, it will create a preview of your content, which can then be posted to a Facebook profile or sent as a direct message.
The simplest way to give a subscriber the option to share your link is to add this code into your email:

http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=URL

Just replace URL with the link you want to share. In the case of an email message, it would be the URL to view your message online. Don’t forget to include a call to action to “share this message”, preferably using a Facebook icon or linked text.

For example here is the link for the blog post of this message arranged so you can share it on Facebook.

Share this post on Facebook

When you create a link such as that, a preview window will open with optional image selections from the page URL provided. There will also be a place for your email recipient to include their thoughts as to why this link is worth viewing. Once they hit the “share” button in that window, the link is posted to their Facebook profile profile, their wall is updated and the URL will appear in the news feed of their friends with your recipients’ endorsement. Your message now has a personal referral to your recipient’s Facebook network!

Showing up in multiple news feeds is when you start to leverage your recipients’ entire friend list. This process has the potential to move virally as people leave comments or share the item with their friends and family – and so on and so on.

Got another idea (or two) for blending Facebook with your email marketing program? Leave a comment or post to my Facebook wall. Otherwise, stayed tuned next week for a couple more ways Facebook can enhance your email marketing program.

This missive was inspired by a Tweet from Simms Jenkins of Brightwave Marketing, who wrote:

another difference between email & twitter is marketers think about what their audience wants b4 sending via email but not so much 4 Twitter

The nature of Twitter lends itself to quick-send behavior.  How much thought can you give to 140 characters anyway?! But to send an email to your list without planning is folly.  It’s also just as silly to think that Twitter and email is an either/or proposition.  It’s possible that Twitter could be used in place of email, but I think that time is still in the distant future.

Cost: Twitter is free monetarily, but there is a price to pay for irrelevant tweets. You alienate your followers and eventually cause them to lose interest, possibly to the point of removing themselves from your list.  Hmmm… this sounds an awful lot like what happens when you send inappropriate emails.

Audience: Your list of Twitter followers can fluctuate in size rapidly – someone can easily follow and un-follow your messages with one click.  But there’s no segmentation capabilities to tailor your tweets to different audiences. So everyone gets the same message – come one, come all.

Use Twitter and Email for same campaign

Cookware and cake-decorating accessory company Wilton has used social media and email in tandem to grow their audience.  Here’s a link to the Marketing Sherpa case study, which delves into their program further.

They used email to grow their social media fans (on Facebook and Twitter) and social media to drive subscriptions to their email newsletter.  Before a product was launched, they use Twitter to tease its release and developed a traditional email campaign to promote the product.

Promote your emails in Twitter

It’s also a good idea to send a Tweet of each email campaign by shortening the web URL of your message (the “view this as a web page” link that should always be at the top of your email) using a service like bit.ly.  When doing that, add a # and a keyword for your product or service. This will help your content be discovered by other Twitter users who have set up a filter for keywords of interest to them.

Twitter in place of email?

A recent ClickZ article suggests that tweets could replace subject lines in e-mails to drive potential customers to offer pages.  With Twitter’s ability to have offers pushed to you like e-mail, without exposing your e-mail address, this article suggests it “could threaten the e-mail marketing channel and reinvent the world of affiliate marketing.”

“While traditional marketing remains an important part of our approach, we are focused on incorporating new components into this year’s Back-to-School campaign that will truly reach youth in an authentic way,” said Mike Boylson, chief marketing officer for JCPenney. “Using this unique approach, we’re able to break through the marketing clutter and sameness to attract kids and teens – whether it’s at the movies, in the mall, on the phone or on the Web.”

But for all the channels J.C. Penney is working in this campaign, there’s no social media! 

There’s a lot of one-way information going on here.  I think the clothing retailer could really cut through the clutter by adding two-way dialogues with the teens and youths they’re targeting.