9 Ways to Combine Instagram and Email to Supercharge Your Marketing

When it comes to digital marketing, email is one of the most traditional and trusted marketing tactics. And all for a very good reason – Email marketing can offer you up to 4200% return on investment. 

However, over the past few years, social media marketing has proven to be just as effective, if not more. Instagram, the photo-sharing platform, has over 1.22 billion active users and the majority of its users fall under the age group of 18-34. 

Instead of separating the different segments of marketing, you can combine email and Instagram marketing efforts to benefit from their own unique advantages.

Here are nine ways to combine Instagram and email to supercharge your marketing efforts:

9 Ways To Combine Instagram Email Marketing

1. Actively Promote Your Newsletter On Instagram

Your Instagram audience may not even know that you have a newsletter, which is why the first thing you should do is actively promote it on your Instagram profile. 

Instagram posts have a character limit and there is no way to add clickable URLs in post captions. So instead, you can use your Instagram bio to add details about your newsletter or lead magnet along with a link to sign up as you can see here on Sophia April’s profile. 

By clicking on the link, followers will be directly taken to the signup page where they can add their email address and become a part of the email marketing list.

You don’t have to always send them to a landing page where they have the option to sign up for one newsletter or lead magnet. You can use url.bio to create a custom landing page where people can learn about you, find different lead magnets/newsletters to sign up for, or even learn about your products. 

Accompany the link with a bio that describes where the link goes to. The goal is to create a bio that can introduce your Instagram profile and at the same time introduce your email newsletter.

When you are writing a caption for your bio, make sure that it’s creative and the CTA is added in a rather fun way. Your Instagram bio can only be less than 150 characters, so keep that in mind as well.

2. Cross-Promote Your Instagram Account In Your Emails 

Email marketing is undoubtedly one of the most powerful ways to increase engagement and reach out to your audience. Your Instagram posts might get buried after a day or two in your followers’ feeds but your newsletter will always be sitting in your subscribers’ inboxes, waiting to be opened. This is exactly why it is just as important to promote your Instagram profile in your regular newsletters. 

One of the simplest ways to do that is by just adding social media icons at the bottom of your emails. They can help you generate more followers and nurture your audience through multiple channels.

Here’s an example of how Goodreads promotes its social media channels in its weekly newsletters.

Here’s another one with more custom colors and design style from J.Crew. 

Creating a signature like this is easy. You can use graphic design software or an email signature generator to design a graphic or an Instagram icon for your email signature. You can customize it to suit your brand style and color palette and then link it to your Instagram account(s). You could also add UTM codes or use a URL shortener to track the clicks on your links. 

You can also go further than that and make your Instagram profile the front and center of your newsletter either by sharing an update from your Instagram account or attaching a link and screenshot to the latest post. 

3. Leverage Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories might disappear in just 24 hours, but they generate higher engagement because of the sense of urgency that they create. 

In the era of the customer, creating Instagram Stories is increasingly important now than before.

People have to willingly open the Stories of people they follow and since the Stories are only 15 seconds long at the most, people don’t mind checking them out. 

More importantly, Instagram Stories allow you to add links that you cannot do with normal Instagram posts or reels. 

Previously, this feature was known as ‘Swipe Up’ and only users with over 10k followers could use it to add a link to their Instagram Stories as Amy Porterfield did here. 

Moreover, people couldn’t respond to ‘Swipe up’ Stories. 

Now, this feature has been retired and replaced with the ‘Link’ feature which allows basically any Instagram user to add links to their Story and even get replies. Links can be added like any other stickers on Instagram. 

You can leverage the power and high engagement of Instagram Stories to share your newsletter highlights and link the page to sign up for your newsletter. The viewers of your Stories will not only be able to get a glimpse into your newsletter but also click on the link directly to sign up for it.  

You can also check out our video on how to add a link to your Instagram Story to see exactly how to do it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzhMKYCBkU8

Be sure to compare the performance of your Instagram Stories vs. normal feed posts – you might be surprised how much they differ sometimes. You can use Instagram’s built-in insights or social media analytics tools to measure and track your performance so you can optimize accordingly.

4. Share Your Instagram Milestones With Newsletter Subscribers

Hit a new big follower milestone on Instagram? 

Don’t just restrict the celebrations to Instagram. Instead, you can double up the celebrations and share them with your newsletter subscribers as well.

Asking people to follow you on Instagram is one thing, but when you share the good news that more than five thousand people are already following you, it will encourage more of your subscribers to take a look at your Instagram feed just to understand what the buzz is about. 

5. Make Instagram Posts About Your Newsletter

You can directly take screenshots of your current newsletter and share them as a post or Story on Instagram. It’s also a good idea to share highlights of your newsletter with your Instagram audience to show how informative and engaging your newsletter is. 

Though make sure to not share your entire newsletter content in your Instagram posts. You want to share just enough to pique the curiosity of your followers so that they will want to subscribe to the newsletter. 

While sharing the screenshot of your newsletter, you can mention in your post caption that the link to the complete newsletter is in your bio – which will, in turn, lead your followers to the signup page for your newsletter. 

You could also create unique graphics that promote your newsletter or lead magnet.

Here’s an example from Mariah Coz. The graphic and the caption describe the lead magnet and Mariah asks you to click on the link in the bio to sign up. 

Make sure the design style of these images matches your social media aesthetic. If you keep things consistent, more people will recognize your posts and sign up for your newsletter. You might also want to keep the landing page and newsletter design styles consistent with the Instagram images while creating the images. A great email marketing and designing tool such as Moosend can help you customize your landing pages, sign up forms, email newsletters, etc. Check out this Moosend review to find out how. 

6. Retarget Your Email List With Instagram Ads

There is a reason why cold email marketing is still considered one of the most powerful ways of reaching out to people, even though email has been around forever. 

Emails give you the digital address of your subscribers. It gives you the power to reach out to your followers and find them on different platforms easily. Consider doing DMARC setup to protect your company’s emails from phishing and other cybercrimes.

To increase your Instagram followers and engagement, you can create Instagram ads and retarget your subscriber list. You could also use these ads to generate sales by promoting a product. 

In the Ads Manager for Instagram, you get the option to create your own Custom Audience by importing email addresses. The Instagram algorithm then maps the email addresses to the respective Instagram profiles of the users and targets them with your ads. Domain security is a top concern when dealing with a huge amount of data, thus it is safe to include an SPF flattening (Sender Policy Framework) to avoid security failures.

7. Encourage Subscribers To Follow Your Branded Hashtags

The power of hashtags on social media is undeniable. Instagram’s algorithm is getting smarter by the day. Even when your posts don’t get easily seen on your followers’ feed, your branded hashtags can make sure your visibility stays high. 

Moreover, when a user follows a hashtag or checks a lot of pictures that use a particular hashtag, Instagram will show more pictures with that hashtag on their Discover feed. 

So if you have branded hashtags, you should share those with your newsletter subscribers and encourage them to follow your hashtags on Instagram. Make sure to link the branded hashtags to Instagram so your subscribers can directly open the social media platform and check out the pictures tagged with the hashtag.

8. Organize A Giveaway On Instagram And Announce Winners In Your Newsletter

The best way to increase followers is to give them an incentive to follow you. 

You can hold a giveaway on Instagram and offer a free product or a 3-month subscription to your services to the winners. 

To hold a successful contest, you should establish the rules and make it mandatory for participants to follow your Instagram page and subscribe to your newsletter list. 

For instance, you can run a contest where you urge participants to share pictures by using your branded hashtags (which can also help you create more user-generated content). 

You can set the contest requirements for the people as follows:

• Post a picture that fits the theme of the contest using the branded hashtag
• Follow the Instagram profile
• Subscribe to the newsletter

To get more people to join your contest, you can also promote it in your newsletter. 

This won’t just help move more of your Instagram followers into your sales funnel but it will also help you connect with more of your subscribers over Instagram. 

Not to mention, the use of branded hashtags can help you strengthen your brand’s online community and make you more discoverable on the social media platform. 

For instance, Hootsuite announced a Twitter and Instagram contest for people to show off their workspace with the hashtag #Iworkfromhome. While the contest was announced in the Hootsuite newsletter, the subscribers were urged to move to the social media platforms to share their entries 

Here’s another step you can take to make sure your Instagram followers actually end up subscribing to your newsletter – Announce the winners in your newsletter and ask them to reply back to you with their details on email only. 

These contests are a proven way to increase your email subscribers, so make sure you learn how to do an Instagram giveaway the right way for best results. 

9. Share Your Instagram Profile Where People Unsubscribe From The Newsletter

When someone unsubscribes from your newsletter, it only means that they don’t want to receive emails from you anymore. That doesn’t always mean that they don’t want to hear from your brand, ever.

On your unsubscribe page, you can share the link to your Instagram account to give people the option to stay updated with your brand on the social media platform.

Combining Instagram & Email Marketing: Infographic

Take Instagram Email Marketing To The Next Level

Both Instagram and email marketing serve different purposes for your brand’s sales funnel. By combining their powers together you can effectively supercharge your marketing strategies and increase engagement as well as conversions. 

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