If, for example, you’re looking to attract more conversions, donations and sales, then you should using a custom graphic on social media to link to your email campaign. When writing copy for that post, consider your audience’s perspective. They’re not going to care as much if your email campaign is a brilliant essay on the changing trends in your industry. For most people, even those who are interested, this is yet another thing they need to process; this would be yet another call to action for their time. Instead, you should pull a pivotal issue from your copy and pose that as a trigger question that evokes a strong response or opinion. When all else fails, you can always ask a question that gets people curious. In order to satisfy that curiosity, they would need to click on your resourceful link.

This way, you’re successfully utilizing social media as bait that’s driving people to your standalone email campaign URL. It also sets the social share apart from the other instance when you’re directly sharing the campaign URL. As any social media marketer knows, you want to post key shares multiple times. Typically, you would stagger the same share across a span of weeks or months. However, depending on the rate at which you’re posting content on social, you can get creative about how you’re sharing. In this case, rather than just recycling a post, you can change the graphic and post copy. Now, you have a brand new post and are likely drawing in clickers that may not have been otherwise interested in the original self-serving social share.

One of the lesser known, out-of-the-box, ways to merge social with email is to actually link your email lists to various social accounts. Most social platforms, including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, all have a way to easily upload email contacts. This is particularly useful for running customized ads to an existing audience base that you might be trying to reconvert or reinforce brand recognition among. Jimmy Daly has a wonderful post on BufferSocial titled “6 Creative Way to Integrate Social Media and Email Marketing,” in which he gives picture guided, step-by-step directions on how to link email lists to various social accounts.

Jimmy also directs readers to another great article that inspires with a creative way to send emails without actually every sending an email. The trick is to use LinkedIn groups as a way to get premier email marketing access without actually trying to secure top-tier priority in someone’s inbox. This revelation was unveiled by Scott Van, who writes “How I Caught Copyblogger Sneaking into My Inbox.” By creating a LinkedIn discussion group where the already pouring in flood of comments could be hosted (and made more widely visible while neatly being archived), Copyblogger ensured that each and every participant who opted in would get automated email updates from a trusted platform: LinkedIn.

The real lesson here though is to always consider how social is evolving. The routes between social and email aren’t quite so traditional anymore; there are fewer and fewer opportunities for one-way conversations as we see with the Copyblogger example.