More For Less: When Social Media Meets Email Marketing
April 27 2012 by Neil Rosen ~ 1 CommentChatter marketing is about triggering emails to subscribers when they view one of your YouTube videos, re-tweet one of your tweets, visit your Facebook page, or blog, or company message board—or in general interact with your company on any social media site where your company has a presence. It is a different way to think about email marketing, a better way to think about email marketing.
Chatter marketing emails will be only a tiny percentage of the total volume of emails you send to subscribers in a given month, yet may well account for 20% or more of the total revenue you generate from email.
Let’s start with the results: emails triggered by social media chatter deliver results far beyond those of standard email campaigns. You will achieve a 100% to 200% increase in clicks, and opens, increasing overall email activity and improving inbox delivery for all of your email campaigns.
In addition, chatter email delivers 20% or more of your total conversions from email, with volume of email sent being only one to two percent of the number of emails you send in a given month.
Sound good? Then read on!
By paying attention to your customers’ actions on social media sites, you derive a broad picture of your customers: you track what pages they visit, what links they click on, what message boards they participate in, what reviews they scan, what groups they join, whose tweets they follow, and so on.
That broad picture translates to email executions.
The first thing people do when they discover a need for a product or service is research it online. And the more expensive and involved the need is (say, a trip to Europe as opposed to the purchase of an umbrella), the more research they do.
They use every aspect of social media to gain knowledge, from search engines to product review sites to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. And since you are one of their trusted vendors (they have given you permission to send them email), they are very likely to use your social pages to do some of their research.
Tracking that research tells you what your subscribers are likely to buy and when they will make the purchase, allowing you to email them relevant offers at exactly the right moment—when they are thinking about buying.
Social media is filled with opportunities to listen your customers. It’s not so different, really, from the days when a salesperson would listen to customers talking in a store and approach them: “I couldn’t help but overhearing that you’re looking for a raincoat…” And why not use these same tested sales techniques online? The difference is that instead of walking up to the customer, you’re sending him or her an email—or a series of emails—focusing on his or her expressed interests.
That’s chatter marketing: where email truly meets social.
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