Despite the effervescent landscape of digital marketing, social media and email marketing can appear to be indistinguishable. With it’s colorful and captivating imagery, Instagram has changed the way brands reach customers. Meanwhile, email marketing itself is a beast when it comes to direct action and conversion. But how do we close the gap and incorporate Instagram in our email marketing? These are some useful guidelines to get you started.
1. Leverage Visual Content
Instagram is all about visual narrative and so should your email campaigns. Use quality images, graphic graphics and engaging videos to make your emails look great. It’s not just a visual matter; powerful images can dramatically raise open and click-through rates. By incorporating action elements, like GIFs, you can recreate the scrolling experience of Instagram and give your emails an interesting edge.
Use engaging images or infographics that portray your brand. Visually appealing emails make them feel connected with the recipients and entice them to stay engaged.
2. Craft Engaging Stories
Instagram Stories can provide real-life stories about what it’s like to be you, your email campaigns can deliver real-life stories that resonate with your audience. Send your emails out to promote customer successes, or behind-the-scenes video, or the new products that are coming out. If you tailor your message to sound less like an exchange, and more like a conversation, then you’ll be taking advantage of Instagram’s narrative power.
Well written stories draw attention and create emotional resonances that prompt your emails to be opened, read and followed. So don’t just educate, entertain and enlighten your audience through the storytelling process.
3. Utilize User-Generated Content (UGC)
Instagram marketing has no place for user-generated content, and it can be effortlessly incorporated into your email lists. Make sure that your customers send testimonials about their experiences with your products, and highlight these in emails. This method does not only build community, but it also promotes trust and credibility by demonstrating real-world use cases of your products or services.
Add a CTA to have recipients share their experiences so they can be featured in future emails. This not only keeps your existing customers engaged but encourages word of mouth to possibly convert new customers.
4. Create Exclusive Offers
Instagram is sometimes a platform for advertisements and announcements. Similarly, your emails must contain exclusive promotions or coupons that subscribers have to pay for so that they feel like they’re on the short end of the line. Promoting these offers in your Instagram feed and stories will entice followers to sign up for your mailing list.
This cross-promotion keeps your social and email channels closer to each other, strengthening your brand’s offer and pushing customers to stay longer.
5. Cross-Promote Email Sign-ups on Instagram
Lastly, make sure you’re building your email list to the maximum by pushing sign-ups through your Instagram feed. Create visual graphics or videos to show why subscribers to your newsletter will get special content, news or discounts.
If you have the ability to “Swipe Up” in stories, use that to take fans directly to your sign up page and make it a lot easier for them to sign up to your list. Regular cross-promotion not only helps your audience engage but also maintains the relationship between your social media and email efforts.
6. Optimize for Mobile
Recent studies show that most Instagram users are using the app on their mobile phones. This, therefore, makes optimizing your marketing for mobile viewing a critical issue in any campaign, particularly with email campaigns.
If you want to appeal to your readers, design your emails responsively. If so, then this means that your emails should automatically scale with screen resolution and be responsive on smaller screens. Invest in quick loading images and short text. As easily as Instagram scrolls, your audience should be able to quickly scroll through emails. Rapid-loading images and visible calls to action keep readers interested and most closely resemble the seamless workflow of an Instagram user.
7. Test and Refine
Instagram and email marketing are both information driven; analytics are therefore a crucial part of any well-executed unified campaign. You can see what’s working and what’s not, based on open rates, click-through rate, and conversion rate of your messages.
Also, A/B testing is a really cool practice that’ll test out different images, messages, or CTAs to figure out what to say and how to tell your audience. Perhaps one demographic is more influenced by bright, catchy images, and another might favor clean layouts and plain text.
You dig into the data, hone your approach with the data, and figure out how to mould and accommodate the subscribers’ constantly evolving tastes and preferences. Iterations will also help improve the existing emails and enable the sender to run future campaigns more efficiently for audiences and achieve better click through and conversion rates.
8. Use a Consistent Voice
Your brand voice is the core of your brand identity. Transparency, everywhere and anytime, builds recognition and trust. It’s not only about the voice of the message, but the emotive touch of each and every single piece of content.
Keep your emails consistent with the voice and content of your Instagram avatar for a one-step brand experience. Whether it’s a playful, professional or motivational tone that defines your brand, this identity will be instilled in your audience’s minds with its uniformity across channels. Readers read an email and instantly recognize the voice they’ve grown so accustomed to. For the most part, they’ll just keep on going deeper, blurring the platform divide.
Final Thoughts:
Adding Instagram love to your email campaign can work together to increase your brand’s outreach and interactions. Using images, narratives, and community-generated content can allow you to create an email campaign that resonates with your audience and converts them. When incorporating these practices, don’t be afraid to experiment, review, and tweak for optimal results. Ultimately, integrating Instagram and email marketing can turn both into gold-plated channels, where followers become clients.
