Social email marketing is one of the main developments in the field of email marketing. Social email marketing seeks a cross-fertilization of email marketing and social media focusing on adding social networking features to your emails and using your e-mails to gather fans around your social network pages. In a whitepaper by StrongMail, called 'Email in the age of social media' (which contains good data and tips), StrongMail writes that the rise of social media is intrinsically connected to email.
However, is it really necessary to combine social media and email marketing and leverage the benefits of both? Does it benefit the customer? And does it have an impact on your company’s bottom line?
I start this post with giving a few tips on how you can make your emails more social, and then I’ll look at some data regarding the efficiency of social email marketing.
Five tips to get started with social email marketing
1. Learn what social media are about and understand the motivations of people who use them.
To know how social media can be integrated into your email marketing campaigns you have to understand what social media are all about. So start with that Twitter account, that Facebook page, etc.
2. Pay extra attention to the content of your email
Content is king and in email it’s even more. Email content should be really relevant (irrelevant content is still the main reason for unsubscribe). On social media people are very busy posting, sending, reading, tweeting and forwarding content that they found somewhere, or that they published themselves. So in social email marketing the focus is even more on the relevance of the content. If you want to see your email content disseminated through social networks you will have to provide valuable content that is worth sharing.
3. Make sure people can effectively distribute your email content
Features such as ‘send to a friend’ exist since ages in email marketing but in order to enable your email recipients to share your content you must of course add the necessary tools (there are several solutions) that make sharing content through social media a matter of just pushing a button or clicking a link.
4. Go beyond your classic email marketing campaigns
Social networks are used by companies to keep their ‘followers’ informed. This can also be done by additional forms of email marketing besides your regular newsletters or other mailings. Many social applications and blog platforms allow you to inform your ‘followers’ by mail each time you post something. A good example is Feedburner. This free application converts the RSS feeds of the content that you post on any blog platform or social network web site into a FeedBurner format allowing you to better analyze what's happening with your feeds. However, FeedBurner also offers a convenient option to enable people to get an email each time you post something new. In other words: besides your weekly emailing, it allows you to reach people daily.
5. Create a maximum of synergies between your emails and social media accounts
Create as many synergies as possible between your Twitter account, your Facebook page, etc. and your emails: besides referring in your emails to pages on your company website also refer to all other channels that you have and enable people to 'follow' you, to have conversations with you and to keep in touch, regardless of the social media you use.
Eventually, social email marketing is about making sure that you're everywhere where your customer is, through all available channels and by a cross-fertilization of these channels so that your customers have all available options to decide how, when and where they want to be in touch with your company.
That seems like a good reason to start with it: after all, is being where our customers are in these digital times the challenge, we are all confronted with? In the end social email marketing is about customer centricity.
What about the bottom line of social email marketing?
As promised, now a word on the impact of social email marketing on the bottom line. A recent poll found that social email marketing is a clear focus for many businesses: 69 percent of respondents plan to integrate social media marketing with their email marketing campaigns in 2010.
The bad news, however, is that, those who already combined social media and email, don’t seem to get significant results from it and/or have trouble measuring them.
Only 42 percent is achieving a lift in campaign performance, 35 percent report, no significant lift and another 23 percent are unable to measure.
Is it because social email marketing is hype? My guess is that’s mainly because of the second part of the ‘bad news’: the trouble many businesses have regarding the measuring aspect.
Jean-Paul De Clerck is a 360° interactive marketing consultant, founder of the Fusion Marketing Experience and owner of conversionation. You can connect with him via Twitter.
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