Name a better organic brand growth duo than email marketing + social media marketing. I’ll wait.
Having a successful organic brand growth strategy is crucial for businesses looking to build long-term customer relationships, increase brand awareness, and drive engagement at multiple points throughout the user journey. While both email marketing and social media marketing have their own strengths, strategically leveraging these channels in tandem with one another can create a powerful synergy that maximizes reach and loyalty. Let’s take a look at how brands can use email and social media to amplify the respective effectiveness of both channels.
What is Organic Brand Growth?
Before delving into the channel strategies behind effective organic brand growth, it’s important to first understand the value of organic marketing and the role it plays in a brand’s overall marketing stack.
Organic brand growth refers to the process of expanding brand awareness, engagement, and customer loyalty without relying on paid advertising. Instead, it leverages authentic, value-driven interactions through content marketing, social media, lifecycle marketing, word-of-mouth, and community-building efforts.
At its core, organic marketing fosters long-term relationships with audiences by providing relevant and meaningful experiences. Unlike paid marketing, which delivers immediate but temporary visibility, organic efforts build sustainable growth by creating trust and brand affinity. When executed well, organic brand growth not only reduces customer acquisition costs but also strengthens brand advocacy — turning customers into vocal supporters who amplify your message naturally.
A strong organic presence also plays a crucial role in a brand’s overall marketing mix, complementing paid efforts. While performance marketing can drive quick conversions, organic strategies ensure that the brand remains top-of-mind, continuously nurturing leads and fostering long-term brand equity.
Social Media Marketing vs. Email Marketing
Social media and email marketing are both core channels that fuel organic brand growth, helping businesses expand their customer base, improve customer engagement, and drive revenue growth. Despite their shared goal of increasing brand awareness and fostering long-term customer loyalty, each channel serves a unique role in a brand’s marketing strategy. When used together, they create a comprehensive plan that enhances both customer experiences and market penetration.
Social media marketing leverages platforms like Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and X (formerly Twitter) to engage with potential customers in real-time. It plays a crucial role in building mental availability by ensuring a brand stays top-of-mind among its target audience.
Key benefits of social media marketing include:
- Broad audience reach: With over 5.2 billion social media users worldwide, brands can tap into vast networks of prospective customers.
- Content versatility: Engaging content formats like short-form videos, live streams, and interactive polls boost customer engagement and customer satisfaction.
- Organic growth potential: Viral content and community engagement help brands grow without large advertising budgets.
However, social media algorithms are unpredictable, and organic reach often fluctuates. This is where email marketing steps in to ensure direct, consistent communication.
Email marketing is one of the most effective brand growth strategies, providing a direct distribution channel to a brand’s customer base without reliance on third-party platforms. Unlike social media, which depends on engagement and algorithmic visibility, email ensures that content reaches subscribers directly in their inboxes.
Key benefits of email marketing include:
- Higher ROI: For every $1 spent on email marketing, businesses generate an average return of $42.
- Personalization & segmentation: Advanced consumer insights and data-driven insights allow brands to send highly targeted emails based on customer preferences and behavior.
- Customer retention & loyalty: Email nurtures relationships throughout the customer journey, from initial awareness campaigns to post-purchase follow-ups.
Channel strength: 99% of email users check their email every day, some as much as 20 times a day. It’s often the first thing people do online, too — 58% of users check their email before they check out social media or the news.
Using Social Media & Email Marketing Together
The battle for growth isn’t about choosing one channel over the other — it’s about using both strategically to maximize impact.
When integrated, social media marketing and email marketing amplify each other’s strengths:
- Cross-channel audience engagement: Social media helps attract new prospective customers, while email nurtures them through the customer journey.
- Repurposed content: Brands can convert high-performing social posts into email content and vice versa to maintain consistent marketing communication.
- Social listening informs email content: Brands can monitor trending topics and audience conversations on social media, then tailor email marketing campaigns based on these insights.
- Multi-screen engagement: Customers frequently check social media and emails throughout the day, reinforcing messaging across platforms.
- Top of funnel → bottom of funnel alignment: Social media builds brand awareness and attracts prospective customers, while email deepens engagement and moves them toward conversion.
- Personalized email content from social insights: Data from social interactions can inform email segmentation, ensuring that messaging is relevant to each subscriber’s interests.
- A cohesive user journey: Consistent branding, messaging, and tone of voice across both channels provide a seamless customer experience that strengthens customer satisfaction.
The key to this organic growth strategy is the practice of cross-channel integration, as opposed to simply using both channels alongside each other or operating in siloes. True cross-channel integration involves combining the strengths of social media and email marketing through strategies like social listening, content repurposing, and retargeting.
Brands can use insights from one channel to inform the other, ensuring consistency in messaging and engagement across platforms. Tactics like syncing visuals, offers, and messaging create a unified experience for customers, whether they interact with the brand on social media or through email. This approach fosters a more cohesive and efficient marketing strategy, maximizing the impact of both channels.
The Value of Social Listening
Social listening is a powerful tool that allows brands to monitor conversations, trends, and sentiment on social media, providing valuable insights into what resonates with their audience. By actively tracking mentions, hashtags, and keywords related to their brand or industry, businesses can identify emerging trends, customer pain points, and preferences.
This data enables brands to tailor their email marketing efforts more effectively. For example, if a particular product feature or content theme is generating a lot of buzz on social media, brands can highlight it in their next email campaign, ensuring the content aligns with what customers are currently engaging with.
Additionally, social listening allows brands to monitor competitor activity and industry conversations, further informing their email strategy. If competitors are seeing success with certain messaging or offers, brands can adapt these insights to enhance their own email marketing approach, creating more targeted and relevant campaigns.
By continuously refining email content based on real-time social media feedback, brands can stay ahead of trends, improve customer engagement, and ensure their emails are both timely and valuable to their audience.
Reformation is a brand that uses social listening very well to tie social media trends to their email subject lines. During the Wicked movie press tour, an interview with Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo went viral for the phrase “holding space for defying gravity.” The moment spawned thousands of memes and recreations all over social media, and Reformation was quick to jump on the trend as well through their email marketing channel with a very strategically-timed, culturally-relevant subject line.
They capitalized on a viral moment, seamlessly integrating into the conversation already taking place on social media. By doing so, Reformation demonstrated a keen understanding of the power of real-time insights and the importance of staying connected to the cultural pulse, ensuring their email marketing was not just timely but also resonant with their audience.
From Top to Bottom (of the funnel)
Using email marketing and social media marketing together offers a powerful way to guide customers through the entire user journey, from top of funnel awareness to bottom of funnel conversion.
Social media is an excellent tool for attracting new audiences, creating awareness, and engaging potential customers at the very start of their journey. Through organic posts, paid ads, and interactive content, brands can reach a wide audience, drive traffic, and generate interest in their products or services. This is where social media excels in catching the attention of prospective customers and nurturing them into considering your brand.
Once the potential customer has engaged, email marketing plays a key role deepening that relationship. Email allows for more personalized, in-depth communication, offering tailored content, exclusive offers, and product recommendations based on earlier interactions. For example, after a customer interacts with a social media ad or signs up for an email list via social channels, a well-timed email campaign can follow up, providing further details, customer testimonials, or incentives to convert.
By maintaining a consistent flow of communication between the two channels, brands can seamlessly move customers from top of funnel awareness to bottom of funnel conversion, maximizing the chances of sales growth and long-term customer loyalty.
For example, when olive oil brand Graza was launching their bottle-sized sweater product, they teased the launch on social media through organic TikTok content to build excitement and anticipation. Their posts showcased the sweater in a fun, engaging way, tapping into the viral potential of TikTok trends and humor. By using social media as the platform to spark interest, they were able to create a buzz, reach a broad audience, and encourage early conversations around the product through the comment section.
They then followed up with an email announcing the official launch, capitalizing on the momentum generated by social media. By connecting their social media efforts with a targeted email campaign, Graza was able to transition their audience from awareness and curiosity to action, effectively guiding them through the customer journey from top of funnel engagement to bottom of funnel conversion. This seamless integration between channels ensured maximum visibility and a higher likelihood of conversion.
Cross-Channel, Data-Driven Content Planning
Email data and testing can provide valuable insights into your existing customers’ preferences, behaviors, and engagement patterns, which can be leveraged to determine more relevant and effective content buckets for your social media marketing strategy. By analyzing email campaign performance metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, you can uncover key trends and interests within your audience.
For example, if you notice a particular product or topic consistently generates higher engagement in your email list, this signals strong customer interest that can be translated into your social media content strategy.
Put Your Dynamic Duo to Good Use
Leveraging both email marketing and social media strategically allows you to create a cohesive, efficient marketing ecosystem that maximizes engagement at every stage of the customer journey. By using email to deliver personalized, high-value content directly to your audience and social media to drive broader visibility and real-time interaction, you can seamlessly guide potential customers from awareness to conversion.
Data from both channels can inform each other — insights from email performance can fine-tune your social content, while social listening can inform more personalized email campaigns. This cross-channel approach ensures that you’re not only meeting your customers where they are but also providing relevant, timely messaging that resonates with their needs and interests.
If you need help developing an omnichannel strategy that leverages the strengths of both email marketing and social media, you know where to find us.
