Email marketing was one of the earliest forms of online marketing and persists to this day. Unfortunately, recent surveys indicate that less than 10% of email marketers are convinced that their use of images to drive engagement is working as well as it should. This is why a lot of marketers have been pushed towards the wondrous realm of social media where finding and targeting customers is easier than ever. By merging social media with email, a lot of marketers are seeing significantly better results.
Most of these integrations are in their simplest form- more than 3/4ths of it is just via social buttons, and less than 15% using social images. Brands have gotten around to using Instagram as a daily driver but only use images from Instagram in only 3% of cases. Here are some reasons why you should be tapping Instagram’s rich content and Followers Gallery for your email campaigns.
More Images than Anywhere Else
Seeing over 70 million photos posted every day and over a billion monthly active users, Instagram has cemented its place in the pantheon of great social networks. It has caught the spotlight for marketers due to its insanely great engagement levels (more than 120x that of Twitter and 58x that of Facebook) and how simple it is to grow organically as well as to buy Instagram likes and views. Unfortunately, Instagram remains criminally underutilized when it comes to using content from IG in emails. If you are still using Facebook as your primary source for social content, you might want to shift gears and jump onto the Instagram bandwagon that is the way forward. Dunkin Donuts and Nickelodeon have done magnificently with email integrations.
Always Deliver Relevant Data
Random images in your email don’t add much value to it if any. Some customers might even scoff at the idea of using a completely unrelated image in your mailer just to make it look pretty. This is why curation is important. You must select your creative assets with extreme care and ensure that they are relevant to the user and likely to pique their interest. You may look into consumer patterns and sentiment analysis if it helps to understand what kind of pictures might make the best picks. You may use seasonal themes, keywords, and effective but popular hashtags because they have proven helpful in the past. It is also a great idea to use filters like Rising, Valencia, and X-Pro II because they appeal the most to users as per statistics.
Conclusion: Aim at Overcoming Roadblocks and Serving What Users Are Looking For
Surveys reveal that most marketers have issues with different aspects of the social integration process, beginning from data collected from various sources and databases and performing deep analytics on it, to taking that extra step to incorporate these feeds and insights into their email strategies. Email is here to stay; as many as 73% of marketers still swear by it and show no intention of dropping it from their marketing strategy whatsoever. If that is the case, there is no excuse whatsoever to ignore Instagram when it comes to integrating social media content and insights. This is the way to go, that much is for sure.
