Adding a dose of Instagram might be healthier for your email marketing campaigns

People love Instagram. Marketers love Instagram too. People love emailers. Marketers love email marketing. However, marketers almost never thinking of merging Instagram and marketing together. We have recently found out that only 14% of all marketers are actually linking social media accounts to their email marketing endeavors. At the same time, a mere 3% are currently leveraging their Instagram content for email marketing.

This led to an interesting experiment. We decided to combine social media information and Instagram images with our emailers. This drove the sales up 7 times the original rate.

Why was this possible?

An average internet user gets about 120 emails per day. Out of these, about 57% are from online businesses, brands, and entrepreneurs. About 76% of these emails contain social media buttons; however, only 14% of these have social images.

We saw 7 times more engagement and sales simply because we leveraged our Instagram content. It delivers about 58 times more engagement from Instagram followers than Facebook and 120 times more engagement than Twitter, per user. The moment you include a part of your Instagram content in your marketing email, you attract the attention of your target audience.

What should you do?

If you still think of Instagram as a passing fancy of teenagers, you need to use a different filter for a fresher view. It has over 500 million active users from all corners of the world. They are searching for new trends, new products to stay trendy and new profiles that will give them trend advice.

Currently, about 71% of all US companies use Instagram and about 67% of these companies use Twitter to spread the word. It is not difficult at all to include Instagram content in your email marketing campaigns. This is a part of a customer-centric strategy and an Omni-channel approach.

The primary thing you should do is include HTML code snippets within the emails. This is a very easy task if you have a smart IT team at hand. A few HTML code tweaks here and there and necessary customization will help you add your company’s Instagram content to your emails.

Adding a live social feed has two over advantages:

• It makes the email more visually stimulating
• It updates the content in real-time

Therefore, no matter the nature of your company, adding your Insta feed to your marketing campaign will definitely increase your website traffic, conversion rates and ROI.

What’s the first step?

Let us not jump our guns here. First, get your Instagram account up and running. Then make all the changes necessary to get a decent number of followers for Instagram. If you are new to the social media channel, you can take help from the likes of Gramistato get your business account optimized.

Keeping alive and active Instagram account is very necessary for all businesses. This humanizes all businesses by making certain aspects of the tangible. Your followers and potential clients can interact with your posts, like them, comment on them and share them on their own feed. This creates a sense of alliance that boost a brand’s trustworthiness and credibility.

Once you add Instagram elements to your emailers, you can reach out to those who have not been very active on Instagram lately. You can convince them to check out your special offers and products promoted on Instagram. Overall, using images and content from Instagram to create your emails is a wonderful way to increase engagement with the users.

How do brands use Instagram to create awesome email campaigns?

• Hosting contests and polls –
• There is no better way to attract a crowd than offering them a prize. You can announce a contest on Instagram to increase customer engagement. Next, create emails that will contain details about the contest and mail it to other Instagram users who may not be as active but have been on your mailing list for long enough.
• #hashtag #everything –
• You simply cannot Instagram-ize anything without including hashtags. You can use the latest hashtagging tools to find out the most trending and engaging hashtags. Or you can combine the previous step with this one and create a photo contest where you state the hashtags. This is a common strategy for increasing user engagement on Instagram and it works like a charm.
• Follow button on Instagram –
• Stalking if frowned upon in the real world. On Instagram, the number of stalkers you have, the better you will fare. You need to announce to your audience about your Instagram presence. Add Instagram buttons at the end of all emails you send out next to your subscribers.
• Get permission for photos –
• Once your competition is over you will find hundreds of amazing photos you can use for your brand publicity. The best way is to be direct about it. Send a DM to the owner of the photo on Instagram about your intentions. While some influencers are hard to set about not sharing the rights of their photos, others are pretty cool about it. Once you get the right to reuse the photo for commercial purposes, you are ready for a visually enticing email campaign that also integrates Instagram.

Let’s do a recap –

Here are the things you need to do for creating a successful email campaign with touches of #Instalove –

• Create your email list using user information from Instagram and all other social media channels.
• Include your website sign-ups on your email list.
• Promote email sign up via your Instagram account.
• Include Instagram generated content in your emailers.
• Watch your email list grow.

Using a fine blend of Instagram and email marketing is the best medicine for an ailing conversion rate. This is a very effective method for B2C businesses to boost sales. However, it may not be as effective for a B2B business.