When it comes to influencer marketing, most people think of social media, and rightly so. However, influencer marketing has a place in your email marketing strategies, too.
Influencer marketing is leveraging the credibility and audience of industry experts and authorities—aka influencers—to improve a brand’s credibility and/or reach a new or larger audience. The potential benefits of influencer marketing are many and include generating a wider audience, increased content reach, more authoritative inbound links, credibility and authority by association, and future content, client and partnership opportunities.
Influencers and Email Marketing
According to Litmus, there are 2 main ways that influencers can help expand your reach via email marketing: 1) email forwarding and 2) social sharing.
Email Forwarding
If you want influencers to forward your message, you need to make sure they’re well written and well designed. Start with a simple subject line that lets influencers quickly decide if your email is something they want to share with their network. Make sure your email is easy to scan and that it relays the most important info upfront. Last but not least, include a clear and compelling call-to-action.
Email personalization makes it more likely that influential subscribers will forward your email to their friends, family and followers. Make sure your email content is relevant to them by using previous influencer behavior and knowledge of influencer interests. This requires knowing your influencers well.
You can also garner more forwards by incentivizing them. Consider including a coupon or discount code right in your email.
If you’re offering an option to invite friends to a service, be sure to make it as easy as possible to invite friends and for the invitees to sign up. You can even offer options to personalize the invite, which has been shown to increase conversions.
Social Sharing
Social sharing is another great way influencers can help expand your reach. It can take the form of the influencer clicking on the social media icons embedded in your email to share your content. In this case, you want to make sure these icons are highly visible in your emails, instead of hiding them in gray at the bottom of your email content. Secondly, influencers can share your email itself on social. Or they can simply mention your brand on social as a result of a call-to-action in your email.
Social shares offer great way to grow your email list, too, since you can embed an email signup on your Facebook page.
Conclusion
While influencer marketing can be time consuming, influencer-shared content is more engaging than paid or owned content. As you progress with your influencer marketing strategy, track your success and optimize your strategy for your target audience and your key influencers.
Need help creating content for or with one of your key influencers? Filament can help! Get in touch with us today to start creating relevant content for your target influencers.
