New Tools and Tips to Strengthen the E-mail and Social Media Bond

The week ended March 13 was the first time that Facebook was the number-one online destination in the U.S., topping Google. So this seems as good a time as any for two marketing solutions providers to release software that aims to integrate social media efforts into cross-channel campaigns.

StrongMail’s Social Studio and Responsys’s Interact Campaign for Social Networks, both of which were announced this month, are campaign management solutions that enable users to automate campaigns for Facebook and Twitter in conjunction with or independently of programs for their other media such as e-mail. Perhaps more important, the solutions also allow users to track and analyze response to those campaigns.

Given that both StrongMail and Responsys were at one time best known for their e-mail marketing solutions, the question of whether social marketing is the beginning of the end for e-mail marketing inevitably crops up. Not surprisingly, both companies pooh-pooh the idea.

At a Responsys user event in New York on March 16, vice president of strategic services Heather Blank put a sardonic spin on the issue: “How does everyone tell you that e-mail is dead? They e-mail the articles to you.”

In an interview the previous week, Ryan Deutsch, StrongMail’s vice president of emerging media, was more philosophical. “E-mail was the first social channel, the first viral channel,” he said. “The trick is how do you make it seamless so that your recipients can share via the social space and e-mail. I look at e-mail marketing as another channel to feed the social experience.”

Indeed, as Blank pointed out, e-mail alerts are the primary driver of traffic to Facebook. What’s more, share-with-your-network (SWYN) links within e-mail messages—links that enable recipients to post a sender-created version of the e-mail to their Facebook wall, Twitter feed, or other network with one click—account for approximately 2% of marketers’ website traffic.

So how do you begin integrating your e-mail marketing and other campaigns with social media? A few suggestions:

• Include SWYN network links on all marketing e-mails. Sounds obvious, but a surprising number of marketers still don’t do so.
• Include an e-mail sign-up link on your Facebook fan page. Again, this is another no-brainer that many brands fail to implement, even though according to Blank, there’s a Facebook app to make this functionality easy to install.
• Promote e-mail opt-in, and particularly SMS e-mail opt-in, via offline channels. In-store, airports, trade shows, billing stuffers, print and broadcast ads, billboards… anywhere and everywhere.
• Reward your customers for their social activity. Deutsch suggested something akin to or integrated with a loyalty program, in which you give customers some sort of benefit for sharing e-mails, posting updates on their Facebook walls, or mentioning your brand on Twitter. Some companies offer contests in which all a customer has to do to be eligible for a prize such as a gift card is retweet the brand’s promotional tweet. At the very least, Blank said, you can send a thank-you message to those who share your content.
• Provide a unique tag for each click-through URL, Blank advised, so that you can track the effectiveness of each channel. Wall posts, tweets, and SWYN links are all examples of click-through URLs that should have their own distinct tag.
• Keep your offers similar across channels. They don’t have to be identical, Blank said. Depending on your user profile for each channel, you may want to offer, say, free shipping on orders of more than $50 to your e-mail subscribers but lower that threshold to $40 on Twitter. Nor do you always have to promote your offers across all of your channels; you could try offering “secret sales” via Twitter only, for instance. But when you do run a campaign across channels, maintain a baseline consistency.
• Don’t feel the need to reinvent the proverbial wheel. Resources and content are in short supply at most organizations, so “look at what you already have available to you,” Blank said, “and start leveraging it in your emerging channels.”

In short, marketing isn’t a matter of e-mail vs. social media; it’s a case of e-mail AND social media. “A lot of the brands we’re working with are trying to bridge the engagement trap” across channels and media, Deutsch said. Now, though, new tools “give marketers the chance to see not how someone is engaged via e-mail or via social media but if he is engaged.”