Social media is here to stay.
Channels such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram are proving to be valuable business tools to communicate to an audience in a very unique and engaging way.
This article will cover some of the simple ways of integrating social media and email.
Include Social Icons in Emails
It’s straightforward and simple, but displaying icons of your various social media channels within your email is a good start.
However, don’t expect huge numbers to migrate across when you implement it.
A lot of the times, people are confused whether those icons are promoting your channels or asking the recipient to share content via those channels.
Ask Email Subscribers to Share and Connect
While having social media channels displayed in your email is an adequate start, you can generate better cross-pollination results through a dedicated campaign. This can be as simple as broadcasting an email communicating to your audience that you have a Facebook or Twitter account and outlining the benefits of “liking” or “following” those channels.
Alternatively, upon signing up to your email database, create an autoresponder thanking them for subscribing and also outline what social media channels you have. This will help generate social media uptake, because if a new subscriber is signing up to your email list, they are probably eager to hear from you.
Encourage sharing of content
Your content can be relevant to those outside of your own subscribers.
Therefore, you should encourage those that have opted-in to share your content to their friends and followers. Provide links within your email campaign that allows your audience to easily share across their preferred social networks.
With Twitter and Facebook, you can even tailor what the share message can be. With Twitter you can define the message/tweet within your email. With Facebook you control the message description via the meta data on the webpage you are sharing. 
Incentivise following
A cross-pollination campaign can be improved with an incentive tied behind it. This can include discounts, access to exclusive content, or something your audience would see as being beneficial by performing this action.
By providing an incentive to perform an action (such as following, liking, etc.), you will improve your chances in gaining a social media subscriber base
There are a lot of platforms and applications that can help facilitate cross-pollination, such as Gleam and a lot of newsletter platforms like Mailchimp feature Facebook apps to install at newsletter signup.
Promote email channel at sign up
This is the reverse of promoting your social media channels on your email autoresponder.
Newsletter signups on websites are pretty standard, but many social media channels forget that a follower/fan doesn’t necessarily mean they know you have an email subscription channel too. If you have a following on a particular social network, don’t hesitate to ask for new email subscribers via that channel.
Facebook has also recently set up a “Sign Up” button in your header that you can set up on your page.
Include a Twitter feed in your email
Try highlighting a particular tweet or your Twitter feed in your email campaigns, this is a great way to cross-pollinate email marketing and Twitter. Platforms such as Movable Ink can even display real-time feeds based on when your recipients open up their email instead of when you send it out.
