Producing quality content takes time. And with businesses stretched thin, keeping up with the demands of running multiple campaigns across multiple channels can easily leave you feeling stressed and frustrated.
But the great thing about content is that it can be repurposed. The content you produce for social media can work beautifully in your email marketing campaigns too.
And we’re going to look at how content repurposing can make your email marketing even better.
Social media is a great place to find images created by your very own customers (known as user-generated content or UGC for short).
If you sell a physical product, such as a clothing brand or homeware, there’s a good chance that loyal customers might photograph what they’ve bought from you and share the images on social media.
You can encourage more customers to do this by asking recent purchasers to tag photos of your product on Instagram. It can also work on Facebook and Twitter too.
Offering an incentive or running a giveaway is one effective way to generate more user-generated content. For example, you could award vouchers to the best image tagged on Instagram.
For a masterclass on how to use UGC, look at the marketing materials of the underwear brand MeUndies. They’ve grown an active community of over 406k followers on Instagram thanks to their fun and racy content.
But much of this content is user-generated – customers and influencers alike are posting thousands of selfies showing their MeUndies underwear. In fact, there are over 32,000 posts with #meundies on Instagram.
And MeUndies has put this user-generated content to extra use by including some of the most popular Instagram images in their email marketing campaigns.
The only images in this email are images created by customers and influencers on Instagram. This not only showcases the MeUndies products but also encourages subscribers to follow MeUndies on Instagram.
Plus, featuring UGC is an effective form of social proof – potential customers see other happy customers wearing MeUndies underwear and that helps bring them closer to buying their own.
Images are an important part of good email design. But producing high-quality images can be time-consuming and expensive.
To save on time and cost, use images and link your feed from your social media accounts in your email templates.
When you add your social media feed into your email, it encourages your subscribers to engage with your brand in multiple ways, as well as allows them to view your brand from new perspectives. Especially if you have a heavily visual type of business, such as jewelry.
Images from Instagram and Pinterest can be used to create newsletter headers. Here’s an example from the wellness brand Well + Good:
Images and takeaways from any webinars you are a part of are also great to add into your email template. By showing yourself in the light of leadership and community, you are positioning yourself in a trusting way while also providing visuals and value to your subscribers.
Well+Good used images from their Instagram account to form the header in their welcome email. The color palettes and subject matter of these images are typical of the images Well + Good posts on Instagram.
And this synchronicity between their social media and email marketing helps foster a stronger brand image and awareness – subscribers will more easily recognize content produced by Well + Good.
Brand awareness – the degree to which consumers recognize your brand, product, or service – helps keep your business top-of-mind so that when consumers are ready to buy, they’ll think of you first.
Creating a strong brand image across your various marketing channels will help your audience become even more familiar with your offering.
But it’s not just the email header where you can use social media images – you can also use them in the email footer. The bottom of an email is the perfect place to mention your social media channels and encourage subscribers to become followers. And using content from your social media channels will show subscribers what they can look forward to when they follow you.
Here’s an example from the women’s health brand Hers:
At the bottom of their email, they’ve included a grid of images taken from Instagram alongside a call-to-action of ‘follow us’.
With headers and footers like these, you can create email templates so that you don’t have to start from scratch with each new campaign.
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As well as using social media images to create headers and footers for your email templates, you can also use more elaborate social media content to design one entire email.
Here’s an example from shaving brand Harry’s to illustrate the point:
This email promotes the three different scents available for Harry’s bar soap and body wash. And it’s done using eye-catching illustrations that are also featured on their Instagram account as animated GIFs.
A lot of work would have gone into designing the animated GIF for Instagram. So it makes sense to repurpose this content across other channels – not only does it save time, but it also saves money.
Rather than having to design fresh content for an email campaign, Harry’s has simply reformatted existing content to suit the format of the email.
Another bonus of this is that it ensures this particular campaign reaches Harry’s audience wherever they might be – on Instagram or email.
In case followers missed the post on Instagram, they’ll receive an email promoting the same products as well.
If you’ve ever found yourself looking at a blank template in your email marketing tool wondering what content to fill it with, take a look through your social media posts and steal your most attention-grabbing designs.
If content is trending with your social media followers, there’s a good chance your email subscribers will appreciate the content too. So consider sharing your most popular social media posts in an email.
Using the analytics in your social media accounts, such as Instagram and Pinterest, or in your scheduling tool, find the posts that are getting the most likes and comments. And then curate a collection in an email campaign.
If you can theme the images, even better, as you can then link to related product pages on your website to drive sales.
Here’s how clothing brand Urban Outfitters does it:
In this email Urban Outfitters has rounded up its most-liked Instagram posts. And each image shows off an Urban Outfitters product, from dresses to trainers.
This is another example of using user-generated content and each image includes the handle of the Instagrammer that created the content. It has the added bonus of encouraging email subscribers to create more UGC – when they see that others have had their Instagram posts featured in an email campaign, they’ll be inspired to seek their own ‘five minutes of fame’ by submitting similar content for Urban Outfitters to feature in their next campaign.
Though you don’t have to use UGC – you can round up your own social media content too. Urban Outfitters sent a similar email to their subscribers rounding up their most-pinned items on Pinterest.
Adding polls and surveys to social media posts is one surefire way to boost engagement. For example, you can use Instagram Polls to ask your followers about their preferences – it’s easy for them to respond, and it provides you with valuable insights into your customers’ wants and needs.
But a social media poll’s usefulness doesn’t end there because you can use the results to create emails that evoke curiosity among your subscribers.
Here’s another example from Hers:
In this email, Hers presents the results of a survey that tells their audience what’s popular and what was most voted for. Granted, the survey was most likely sent via email. But it’s a good example of how to use survey results to create an email.
Social media polls can also give you insights into what’s popular with your audience.
Of course, you can also run social media polls as a survey via email and collect results across multiple channels. This will give you even more results to later share with your audience.
Including customer testimonials pulled from your social media accounts can provide that all-important social proof to help convert subscribers into customers.
Here’s an example from deal finder site Scott’s Cheap Flights:
The goal of this email is to persuade the audience to sign up for a free trial of the premium membership. And by including a few customer testimonials from Twitter, Scott’s Cheap Flights assure potential trialists that they won’t regret the decision.
Using testimonials like this is a great way to show off the benefits of your product or service, in the actual words of your customers. It helps build confidence among prospective customers who will take these testimonials as proof that your product or service is trustworthy.
And thankfully social media testimonials are easy to collect – simply search posts you’ve been tagged in and pick the most positive ones. If you’re low on social media testimonials, use one of these 25 proven ways to get more customer reviews on social media.
Constantly having to come up with new ideas for email marketing campaigns can be frustrating. But by repurposing existing social media content, you can save time, money, and your sanity.
So when you’re next looking at a blank email template, wondering what to send to your subscribers, remember to:
Repurposing content is just one way to integrate social media with your email marketing. And when done well, each channel feeds into the other, giving you greater reach, increased engagement, and more opportunities for conversions.
Content repurposing is a common marketing tool in which you take already existing content, such as your social media content, and recycle it into a new format suitable for another one of your business’s marketing channels, such as email!
Many marketers and business owners understand that “content is king”. However, having to constantly come up with and create new content for every marketing channel is extremely challenging and time-consuming. By repurposing your content you are saving yourself and your employees time and energy to use on other initiatives.
The important thing to remember is that your social media marketing and your email marketing are very different. You can’t simply copy and paste your social media content into an email template and call it good. The best way to write good email content from your social media content is to reformat it. This can be expanding on sections or shortening them, adding links, reworking or removing images, and trying to avoid copying all of the content verbatim, as your email list will likely notice.
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