5 Ways to Use #Hashtags in Your Email Campaigns

#Hashtags!  They are everywhere, and using them into your email marketing campaigns can boost open rates and user engagement. Here are five ways to use #hashtags in your email campaigns.

1. Connect Your Email and Social Strategy with a Single #Hashtag

Choose a hashtag that best represents your current marketing campaign or brand and reverberate this hashtag throughout your social media platforms, websites and within your emails.  Do your research to find the right combination of a hashtag that your brand can “own” but is simple to remember and engage with. This way your fans can easily track and join in any conversation within multiple channels with a simple click or search of your hashtag.

#StayPowerful is a hashtag used by Mophie across their email, website, and social to amplify their super bowl contest campaign.

 

2. Find and Display User Generated Content (UGC) to Boost Social Proof

People trust other people more than anything a brand says, so leverage user generated content in your email campaigns.  Once you find great mentions of your brand, display them in your email to validate your message with social proof. Search hashtags related to your brand to increase engagement and instill trust.

3. Promote a #Hashtag Contest

Promote a contest using your brand’s hashtag. For example, hold a contest on Instagram asking fans to post pictures of them using your product and to submit using the contest hashtag.  This way participants (and you) can look at all the submissions when that specific hashtag is searched for.  In your email, feature the winners and reiterate the hashtag. This gives you a chance to feature your best brand advocates as well as letting other fans who may have missed the contest engage.

4. Use Hashtags in Your Email Subject Line

Not only does the hashtag symbol (#) stand out within the sea of characterless subject lines in an inbox, but the hashtag also helps you to save space when concocting the perfect subject line by summarizing a more complex statement into a single hashtag.

The subject line for this American Eagle email was #LiveYourLife.

5) #MoreAdvice: Don’t Over Use Hashtags

Don’t over use hashtags (#hashtagging#more#than#three#words is best avoided) as it looks horribly unprofessional and like you don’t know what you’re doing.  And if you don’t know what you’re doing at least pretend like you do by avoiding hashtagging every word.

 

Just saying…

Also, a great way to make a hashtag with more than one word easier to read is to capitalize the beginning of each word like we did with #MoreAdvice as opposed to using #moreadvice which could be misread as “mo read vice.”

What are some other useful ways you use hashtags in email?