From "Like" to Subscribe: Integrating Your Facebook and Email Marketing

From "Like" to Subscribe: Integrating Your Facebook and Email Marketing by guest author, Phil Hollows, CEO of Feedblitz.

There are many venues outside your blog and web site that can help grow your audience, increase brand awareness and ultimately drive sales for the small business. Facebook  is often the primary place where customers and prospects interact with you and your business on a regular basis, and so Facebook Pages are a key element in modern social media marketing.

Facebook has the Audience - but not Your Brand

Unless you're making a ton of money and have invested in advanced Facebook design work, odds are your Facebook looks much like everyone else's. A lot of blue. No branding. Tabs for your wall, info and apps, and maybe a box or too on the left.

Looking consistent like this works really well for Facebook, but leaves your business undifferentiated. It's also very hard to sell anything from a Facebook page and, to all intents and purposes, impossible to monetize those visitors with ads.

The trick to branding, advertising and sales, then, is to get your Facebook audience out of the Facebook "walled garden" and onto your site, blog or mailing list.

Apps, Apps and More Apps are the Problem, not the Solution

So the first things most of us do is grab an app or two to allow email subscriptions from Facebook. You've added a service or app to put your blog posts onto your walls.  You write Wall posts as well (always with a link back to your site, of course) and you're doing all that you can to get visitors to where you can really engage them.

Actually, not so much.

The problem with lots of different services from different vendors is that you end up with a set of piecemeal solutions that don't interact with each other, and which don't complement each other. They look after themselves, but you end up missing the big picture.  The whole should be greater than the sum of the parts, and all too often it isn't - and if those apps are free, the price may be "right" but what are you missing out on?

Get a Social Marketing Solution, not (yet another) App

What you want is a service that will not only add value to your Facebook interactions, but understands that your Facebook Pages are part of your online marketing whole, using each Facebook interaction, app or post as an opportunity to grow your list and redirect visitors back to your site.

A single service email and social marketing solution that integrates comprehensively with Facebook should:

• Drive traffic from Facebook to your site.
• Have Facebook help you grow your email list, not compete with it.
• Enable the Facebook "Like" from your web pages and your email content.
• Posts to Facebook for you and invites the reader to join your list when it does.
• Gives you metrics to compare email, Facebook and Twitter interactions.

Ideally, your solution should do all of this automatically, with minimal care and feeding from you on an ongoing basis (and support for when you need it too).

Unify and integrate all your Facebook and other social media marketing using a solution that shares this vision of comprehensive integration, automation and analytics to make the most of all your online marketing activities.

Phil Hollows is the Founder and CEO of FeedBlitz, the premium FeedBurner alternative for RSS statistics, email and social media marketing. FeedBlitz delivers on Phil's vision of integrated Facebook marketing, as outlined in this blog post on FeedBlitz News.  Follow Phil on Twitter at @phollows

 

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Comments

[dotCOMreport.com]

GREAT post. So very important for companies to set themselves apart with their Facebook pages. Thanks for the reminder.

[Phil Hollows]

Thank you for allowing me to guest on your blog, Denise. Always a pleasure working with you!

Thanks

Phil

[Kymberly]

Good reminders, Phil. Any suggestions for FB biz page fans who think they are subscribed to our website since they click on the FB links that go back to our site when we have new posts? How do we diploatically tell them following us on FB and accessing our posts through links is not the same as being subscribed? KymberlyFunFit

[Phil Hollows]

Hi Kymberly:

If they click on the links that and go back to your site then they're beahving like a subscriber, so in one sense your FB page is working!

Still, to capture that email address you should do the basics, such as having the subscription form clearly visible above the fold and a clear call to action that asks them to subscribe. If you're a little techie (or have a tame geek you can call on!) you can get a littke script written that identifies facebook visitors and reminds them to subscribe directly. There are wordpress plugins that do this (google search is your friend here); you see them on blogs where a little text appears and says something like "welcome facebook visitor, subscribe!" Just make sure you have it ask for email not RSS subscriptions, because an RSS subscription won't get you much further along since you still won't get that lead data.

Hope this helps!

Thanks

Phil

[Kymberly]

Good advice that is simple enough for me to follow. Now to find that plug in and work its magic! Thanks!