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If you’re looking to take your email and social media activity one step further, you’ll want to check out a new startup called BrandMyMail.com which helps small- and medium-sized businesses integrate their social media presence into the emails they’re sending out to customers.

Intrigued? I was.

BrandMyMail is a new startup that helps business owners ramp up their email by allowing them to build customized templates that include hand-selected segments of their social media presence.  Operating through a simple browser extension, BrandMyMail is able to pull the content sources in and include them as part of your messages. Right now that gives SMBs the ability to include Facebook statuses, Twitter feeds, video and photo content from YouTube and Flickr, blog posts from services including WordPress and Tumblr, and eBay content listing the user’s available products directly into the messaging they’re sending to customers.

I took a few minutes to set it up on my personal Gmail account and must admit the process is really easy and creates a very clean template to work from. Here’s a sample template of what the integration could look like:

You’ll notice the content above, a dynamic email signature below, and Twitter and Facebook links on the right-hand side. For a small business owner, this is an interesting application for a couple of reasons.

First, we’re always looking for relevant ways to tie our social media presence into everything else that we’re doing. If you’re spending time working on those social media resolutions, you want to make sure your customers are aware of what you’re doing. You want them to see your tweets, your Facebook updates, what’s new on your blog, what videos you just uploaded, etc. Including this type of content in your messaging gives them something else to interact with and exposes all the different elements of your brand. This is a great way to get it all done in one step.

I also like that SMBs are able to create a variety of templates. For example, if you’re responding to a customer service issues, maybe you want to make sure your YouTube videos are included in the messages so that your customers can see the tutorials you have available and you can even direct them there in your email. Or if you’re sending out an email newsletter, maybe you want to highlight your Facebook feed or make sure they see the products you just uploaded to eBay. This extension gives you the ability to target content based on the message.

Another reason I’m interested in this extension is because it makes your email more interactive. Google allows for some of what BrandMyMail does, but it only pulls in static information. BrandMyMail takes that one step further by almost making your email real-time and syncing your social media activity. And because you get to pick which activity is included, you get to craft a stronger message. I like that.

Right now BrandMyMail works with your Gmail through Chrome or FireFox extensions, as well as iPads and iPhones. Integration into other clients [Hotmail, AOL, Android] are reportedly forthcoming, so keep your eye out for that if you’re nor a Gmail user.

What do you think? Would you use a browser extension like BrandMyMail?

From Small Business Trends

BrandMyMail, A New Way To Integrate Social Media & Email

View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends