One simple step everyone can take to make their mortgage marketing email efforts more compatible with their social media efforts is to link all of your emails to your social networking profiles or blogs.
Most of us already have email signatures, so why not add these links right there with the rest of your contact information? Since most of the well known social media sites (which is where you should be focusing your efforts anyway) have well-recognized logos, I think it is a great idea to use those logos/icons as the hyperlink vs. just a plain text link; that catches the eye of the reader a little better, plus it is more visually appealing.
So the way I have done it is I have a link to my FaceBook, LinkedIn, and Twitter profiles as well as a link to my blog. If you don’t have profiles on any of these networks and don’t have a blog that is a whole other discussion (you need to get them).
Unfortunately, adding these icons to your Outlook email signature may be a bit more cumbersome than you might think. That being said, I have prepared a brief tutorial video below to guide you through the process. This demo is accurate as of Outlook 2003.
By the way, this is the site I used to get the icons we used in our email signatures: http://www.iconspedia.com/. But a simple Google image search will find you whatever you are looking for as well.
David, I enjoyed your social media article and the tutorial. Very informative and to the point.
Todd
Interesting article with some very interesting ideas. I agree that being able to link your social networks through your email is a great tool. The only problem I see that could arise is that using all of those cumbersome buttons and images could start to make your emails look unprofessional and lack clarity. Just a thought. But great article some awesome food for thought.
I agree with you, Bill. My email signature is a simple phone number and link to my web site. Since I view most of my emails from my phone, I generally don’t look at the messages that take too long to load.
However, if you upload the link like David explains this post, it does speed up the process of viewing messages.
Another thought about the multiple buttons and flashing call to actions in an email signature is that they tend to get distracting when you have a lengthy back and forth email conversation.
But – I’m a fan of the 140 character Twitter conversation, so I’m obviously biased on this particular topic.
@Mark – “Another thought about the multiple buttons and flashing call to actions in an email signature is that they tend to get distracting when you have a lengthy back and forth email conversation. ” – yeh, i only use this for new emails, my response email signature is very basic