Brands use social media in two major ways: creating a social presence on networking sites to communicate with consumers and monitoring what’s being said about their brand online. Both activities are important, but neither provides an easily repeatable and scalable way to turn a brand’s social media marketing learnings into targeted ?follow-up campaigns that drive a desired action. ?
Social networking sites offer marketers rich, new sources of customer preference and activity data. The key is to use that data effectively. “Social e-mail” can help close the loop between the customer and the shopping cart with e-mail campaigns that are relevant to a brand’s social engagement ?with customers. ?
“Social e-mail” is a term used to describe the combined use of social media data and e-mail data to accomplish several key online marketing tasks: increase e-mail relevance; improve targeting effectiveness; enhance social media engagement; and drive online sales. ?
Neither e-mail nor social marketing campaigns alone will likely provide the comprehensive view of your customers that an effective social e-mail program can achieve. Effective ?social e-mail relies on the information exchange between ?your e-mail marketing database and social sites. There are three steps that will help to get you there.?
Step one is to get more from the social sharing that is already taking place. Social sharing links such as, “share to social” or “share with your network,” provide great insights for marketers to identify the members of your e-mail subscriber list who frequently share your content.?
In step two, focus on list acquisition. E-mail sign-up widgets on your social media pages can grow your list and help you identify the top social networks with which your subscribers engage. Use this data to deploy triggered welcome campaigns that are personalized based on a new subscriber’s preferred social networking site, and to optimize your overall social media marketing activities based on network popularity.?
By step three, you should know which e-mail subscribers are most socially engaged with your brand and the social sites new subscribers use to directly engage with it. Now you’re ready to engage and target, so you’re conducting truly social e-mail campaigns where your marketing is targeted based on social engagement and optimized to the preferences of your most socially valuable e-mail subscribers. ?
Socially engaged e-mail subscribers are frequently among a brand’s most valuable customers. Use the information you have about their engagement to increase loyalty and ?customer lifetime value.
