Creating new content is hard and time-consuming. If we consider textual content alone, it’s quite labor intensive because writing well is hard, especially if you need to win over an ever-scrolling audience with just a few words.
Fortunately, we can repurpose/recycle content according to the prerequisites of discrete marketing channels. Now, this, too, while not as time-consuming, requires creative vision. Repurposing is not copying or reusing. It is ultimately a standalone enterprise, albeit that which requires furrowing initially on a prepared field.
Content recycling is uppermost in the minds of marketers. In a survey of 48 marketers conducted by Referral Rock, 94% of the respondents said that they repurpose content for various marketing channels, while the remaining 6% said that they were thinking of doing so in the near future.
Content repurposing is not a whip-smart, on-the-spot alternative; it’s part of your marketing strategy. It’s not forking under pressure in the middle of the road but one of the lanes of the road itself. It’s non-negotiable, and most importantly, it works like a charm.
Social Media Content And Email
Repurposing involves transformation. It’s basically making new. Flipping the kaleidoscope, if you will. To repurpose your best social media content for email is to make it relevant to your most recent subscribers, potential subscribers, and, in certain cases, your least-engaged contacts.
It’s primarily adapting your content to the sensibilities of a different audience on a different channel. You can do it yourself, provided you have a driven, creative team behind you, or you can engage seasoned professionals to manage your social-integrated campaigns.
Now, it’s important to realize that not all of your top-performing social media content is necessarily relevant to your email subscribers. If, for example, a subscriber has already come across the content on your social media feed, you may want to hold off on sending the repurposed version.
Not that it’s bound to fail. But first, make sure your content will create value for your subscribers. That’s the whole point of anything you might do to engage your audience in order to extend the loyalty patch.
5 Ways To Repurpose Your Social Content For Email
While this is not an exhaustive list of how you can repurpose your social content for email, it is a preliminary approach to envisioning and implementing your objectives.
1. Design A Roundup Email
A roundup email is a list of brand events, blog posts, social media comments and shares, most popular products, and more. It’s a very effective way of getting your subscribers up to speed with the latest happenings. For instance, here’s how Pinterest has curated a week’s top Pins in their email.
Using the analytics in your social media accounts, such as Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, etc., you can view your most popular posts and then curate a collection for your email. Designing a roundup email may take a while, but with the right designers at your disposal, you can step it up.
2. Add User-generated Quotes
Social media has brought brands and consumers together in ways that were unthinkable before. For the first time, you can know for sure how your customers feel about your brand.
Buying a product is now part of a customer’s ethos, not just a one-time monetary interaction with a distant seller. As a result, brands can interact with customers to the point of the latter’s value system. That’s how deeply you can engage with your audience.
This is good news since you can now make your content more authentic by allowing your customers to share their stories. And it works. In fact, 79% of consumers say that user-generated content affects their purchasing decisions.
Adding user-generated content in your email builds trust in your subscribers, nudging them to buy from you without you having to be overly promotional, just like this email from Austin Eastciders.
3. Add Expert Testimonials
Testimonials are a great way to pique subscriber interest and prick the buying nerve. Often, customers hesitate to click the Buy Now button for various reasons, such as a bad review, an off-the-cuff potshot by a friend, a lack of product specifications, etc.
While one may have realized the need for a product, these external influences, at times genuine, at other times frivolous, tend to hold back the customer. Besides, your traditional customer is wary of being sold to.
“The average consumer is resistant to the sales pitch by conditioned response. As soon as the salesman starts talking, they believe they are being sold and put up safe guards,” says John Michael Coleman, Sales Director at Wellis Spa USA.
At this point, your best bet is to fly in experts/clients who have used your product and can validate its effectiveness. Here’s a beautiful, well-designed email from Violet Grey that uses testimonials.
4. Repurpose Poll/Survey Results
Social media polling is one of the best ways to gauge audience interest. If you ran a poll and had a good response, share it with your email subscribers. Such emails reinforce your brand image as being customer-focused across channels.
Now, in spite of the power of email in marketing, it still gives subscribers a rather tapered view of your brand compared to how your audience sees you on social media. As a result, your email subscribers, particularly those who are social teetotalers, may have a limited understanding of your products and services.
Including survey/poll results in your email will revitalize and expand the way your subscribers look at your brand. It will ultimately help them to get the best out of your offerings.
Importantly, you needn’t share only the best results of your social polls. This may come across as inauthentic.
So, if you announced a poll on customer experience, and the results show that most customers would like you to make improvements in certain areas, you could share the feedback with your subscribers while letting them know how you propose to make changes.
What this does is it makes you look vulnerable, therefore real, and also includes the subscriber into your in-house goings-on, thereby making them part of your journey.
5. Leverage Group Chats On Social Media
The social dimension of purchasing has had a new lease of life, thanks to social media. Purchasing is not ultimately a solitary activity; it spreads, eventually involving a group of people who share the same interests and sing in the same moral tenor, so to speak.
Now you have a group of buyers who are gathered around one of your products, chitchatting, making comments, liking, sharing, and so forth. You can use their conversation in your email and trigger urgency in the subscriber’s mind.
It’s also a very healthy trust-building exercise on the subscriber’s part. Now they are certain of buying the product and also that buying it would mean getting to be part of a story, of a larger context. This is way more effective than pasting a ratings wheel at the head of your email.
In the following example, Graza has used group chats in their email. Off-topic, we just love Graza’s subject line for this email: ‘Graza in the wild’.
Wrapping Up!
Combining social media and email is a powerful instance of cross-channel marketing. Now, given that the average consumer must interact at least seven times with a brand before buying from it, cross-channel marketing ensures that each interaction is apropos to the pain point of the consumer.
Equally, your consumers are assured that they are not being engaged in silos, potentially missing the action on other channels. Indirectly, you may have encouraged some of them to transition to a new channel, thereby broadening your reach.