Best Practices: Social Media & Email Marketing Integration

Is your dealership marketing itself on social media? What about through e-newsletters that are sent directly to your customers’ inboxes? Take it a step further…for the best results your dealership should be doing both!

Integrating these two powerful platforms for reaching your customers is a powerful way to drive engagement, leads, and ultimately sales through your dealership website.

Do you have e-newsletter opt-in forms on your social media pages? To avoid losing visitors on your Facebook page, these can be custom-built so that users can fill out the form without being navigated away from social media. Promote your e-newsletter in your social media feeds and watch your number of subscribers go up – algorithms through Facebook consider posts like news articles and “email only” exclusives higher quality, and help them perform well by ranking them higher.

In turn, you should be promoting your social media pages in your e-newsletters. Experiment with placements of your social media buttons – do you get more new followers when they are placed at the top of your e-newsletters, at the bottom, or within the content? Another idea is to re-post content that performed well on social media in your emails. When certain posts receive a lot of attention or interactions, consider that popularity with your audience and utilize the content in your emails.

One tip to encourage engagement and interaction is to share fun videos, stories, and other content on social media that don’t necessarily promote your dealership but will make people laugh or want to connect.

Here is a great example from one of our dealerships, Aberdeen RV. This video has nothing to do with promoting dealership sales, the primary reason for their social media presence, but it drove engagement and helped to reinforce the dealership as a family-friendly business with a good sense of humor. It may not be worth it to devote an entire e-newsletter to a funny video, but you could always link it with your other content! (And here’s the link for all of you – it’s worth watching! https://www.jukinmedia.com/videos/view/929773)

Another great tip is to invite those who unsubscribe from your e-newsletters – yes, that will inevitably happen – to follow you on social media. Chances are, in many cases those people don’t want to cut off all contact with your dealership. Connecting through social channels can save that customer relationship.

Dealer Spike’s Marketing Packages can help with social media marketing, email marketing, and the integration of both! Reach out to our sales team today to find out more.

Thank you to IBM Marketing Cloud as a valuable resource for this blog post.