Assess the impact of your social and email programs
Catherine Magoffin
Social media has turned email, an established channel for most marketers, into an exciting new frontier for marketing testing, learning and optimization. By tapping social insights and integrating social and email programs, both programs are strengthened and the customer dialogue is enhanced. Ultimately, marketers can take a more holistic customer lifecycle approach.
Simply appending social sharing buttons to emails helps connect the dots between customer touch-points and gives your email campaign extended reach, but ultimately it's gaining measurements and insight from social media that helps drive more effective and relevant email campaigns.
However, traditional email measurement — volume of sent messages, delivery percentage, open rates and click-through rates — is not enough. Social media takes measurement to the next level. Marketers are able to understand the viral reach of their campaigns including what is being shared within social networks and who is doing the sharing. Tracking the full tail of social sharing provides true insight into what the customer cares about and how they prefer to communicate with and receive offers from a brand.
Social media insight can also be used as market research. It addresses the needs of an overall market because you're able to understand and fix those needs based on what the customer says. Additionally, promotional elements, product features and competitive insight can all be assessed.
To improve both your email program and overall marketing campaign, ask yourself what promotional elements see the most traction in the social space. Other questions to address include what consumers are saying about competitors' marketing effort and which areas of the product or service does it make sense to highlight.
Social media also provides an opportunity for email marketers to segment audiences. Based on what they learn, marketers can craft more targeted, personalized messages with specific calls to action. The content and promotions offered in future email campaigns can be tailored to those customers and subscribers who interact on social media. On the other hand, marketers can help drive a relationship with those that don't interact via social with a compelling call-to-action.
The overall goal in email marketing is relevancy. In the end, you want actionable reporting that enables you to make a decision based on what you've measured. It's all driven by data points. Marketers that effectively turn those data points into insights and apply them to campaigns will be successful in making a more relevant campaign, ultimately leading to increased ROI.
