Marketing: Marrying Social Media with Email

How new tools help create integrated marketing

by Joe Dysart

Smart marketers looking to get a handle on social media as a promotional tool have found an easy solution: integrate the medium into existing email marketing programs. They say a little creative contact with current and potential customers on social networks like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter can add new muscle to tried-and-true email.

Case-in-point: some new tools available with StrongMail's new Social Studio (strongmail.com/products/strongmail-social-studio/) service enable eyecare businesses to match email addresses in their databases with ‘top influencers'—or people who have a lot of active friends online—and then reach out to those influencers with rewards, offers, and word-of-mouth promotional programs.

A number of marketers have already used Social Studio to invite influencers to alert their Facebook friends about discounts and promotions, and then give rewards to the influencers who generate the most conversions in terms of referred sales or another desired action.

At Flowtown, you can input any email address, and instantly pull up Web activity associated with that address

Sophisticated new suites like Interactive Marketing hub offer marketers campaign dashboards they can use to create, manage, and monitor such integrated programs across all digital media

INVASION OR MARKETING?

These programs have the power to ferret out social activity on the Web with the simple input of an email address. For example, Flowtown (flowtown.com/tour), a niche service that focuses on mining and manipulating evidence of social networking, invites all visitors to its website to input any email, and instantly pull up all the Web activity associated with that email.

Granted, ECPs and all marketers will need to tiptoe lightly between rolling with the latest way to socialize digitally and being perceived as willing participants to privacy invasion.

Facebook's “Like” button has become one of the most coveted on the Web by marketers

Responsys also offers an all-in-one email/social media marketing solution

The ability to monitor every public move made by a person on the Internet is already available, and it is sure to become only more pervasive in coming years. In fact, some of the more sophisticated programs now offer marketers campaign dashboards to create, manage, and monitor such integrated programs across all digital media, including email and Web.

MANAGING MULTIPLE ACCOUNTS

Other tools are available for managing multiple social media accounts. One such service, ExactTarget's Interactive Marketing Hub (exacttarget.com/hub/index.html), offers a ‘CoTweet' social module, that enables businesses to manage multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts, track conversations, and schedule posts, all while monitoring the activity with analytics and reports.

Similar programs offering all-in-one solutions include Interact Campaign, from Responsys (responsys.com/suite/index.php), and the solutions from the aforementioned Social Studio from StrongMail. Both programs are from long-established email marketing companies.

BLURRED DISTINCTIONS

For some, this fusion of email marketing and social media seems inevitable. The study “View from the Social Inbox,” released earlier this year by Merkle (merkle.com), found that active social networkers are also likely to be avid email users.

All told, the study found 42 percent of social networkers check their email four or more times a day, as compared to just 27 percent of those who don't socialize online.

COMBO PLANS

As the fusion between the two Web mediums gels, here are some strategies marketers have already used successfully to combine both, either by using pre-configured programs or by putting together applications of their own. (See the sidebar below on contests for more ideas.)

● TOP INFLUENCERS. Reach out to top influencers in new ways. With the ability to monitor social networking activity like never before, marketers are getting very creative about reaching out and partnering.

Many of the email/social media suites and services, for example, are allowing them to input an entire customer email list, and instantly identify the email addresses on that list owned by people who have hundreds or even thousands of friends on Facebook and similar social networks. Marketers can then reach out to these people via email, and partner with them on word-of-mouth promotions.

Some new programs can also track the referrals these influencers generate, and verify which influencers are ultimately generating the most conversions, in terms of sales or some other desired action. Subsequently, la crème de la crème can be rewarded most substantially, and primed for a series of unfolding word-of-mouth promotions.

● TOP MEDIUM. Running an email database through some of these more sophisticated email/social media programs can also yield a picture of your patients.

You may find that the greatest percentage of them are congregating on Twitter, rather than Facebook. Consequently, you'll be able to put your digital marketing dollars where they'll reach the greatest percentage of your patients.

● INCENTIVE TO LIKE. Give people a reason to ‘like' you on Facebook: The ‘like' button on Facebook has become one of the most coveted clicks in marketing.

When someone ‘likes' your business on Facebook, your products or services become quantifiably more important, and more desirable. Many Facebookers click the ‘like' button in the hopes they'll get a freebie from the company. When possible, offer a coupon or some other tangible reward for the endorsement.

● ADD LINKS. Optimization is as easy as adding links to the key social networks in your emails, including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. There's also a “Share This” button (sharethis.com/) you can add to your email that offers clickable access to dozens of social networking sites. EB

Joe Dysart is an Internet speaker and business consultant. Email: joe@joedysart.com.