Social Media Grows Up: Connecting Email and Social Marketing

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Chances are you are a friend, a fan or a follower. Social networking tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and others have become a part of our electronic communications toolbox. As the original adopters of social media enter the workplace and the channel itself matures, the interest in using the medium for business purposes has increased. A 2010 Annual Collaborative Internet Survey published earlier this year by FaceTime Communications revealed that 61 percent of end-users access social media sites at least once per day, with 15 percent admitting to visiting social media sites “constantly throughout the day”. It appears from the study that social media use is not contained to just a few in the workplace as 95 percent of employees use social media for work or personal reasons. FaceTime reports that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are particularly popular business tools because of their ability to contact prospects, screen job candidates, promote events and extend business communications.

Social media in the workplace is expanding the outreach of companies in ways not available previously. There are some friends, followers and fans (and media hype) that say it is better than email to the extent that some claim it will replace email, but don’t cue Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” just yet. Many email marketing experts believe that social is the best thing that could have happened to email marketing. Stephanie Miller, vice president global market development, ReturnPath holds such a belief and notes that there have been many challenges to email marketing over the years, spam being a primary one. Miller thinks that email marketers should not fear social media, but embrace it. “I know it sounds ironic because everyone is always saying that social is going to kill email, but I think the social revolution has created very empowered consumers, and those consumers are not just able to voice their opinions, they are willing to voice their opinions, they want to. They are ennobled by it.”

It’s Not Email Vs. Social

One of the first things a savvy email marketer needs to understand is that it is not an either/or situation. “There have been so many salacious stories in the press of late that say email is dead or proclaim the death of email and that social is replacing it. But it’s certainly not true at all,” says David Daniels, CEO of The Relevancy Group and former Forrester Research analyst. “You have to remember that you need an email account to have a social networking account to pay your bills online, and when you have social interactions, there is an email communication. Social has driven even greater email volume to the inbox, which consumers or the people you are targeting have to wade through.”

Many businesses seem to be experimenting with social media in a rudimentary way, as Miller observes: “There are a lot of people that have Facebook pages, but that doesn’t mean that they are creating a great customer experience.” To do that, most online marketing experts recommend not replacing the email channel with social media, but rather integrate social into overall online marketing strategies.

In witnessing the first wave of social marketing by businesses, Simms Jenkins, CEO of BrightWave Marketing, describes efforts at integrating social into email programs as being “a pretty elementary one where marketing folks are adding buttons at the bottom of their email like ‘forward to a friend’ that no one really uses. I think people have done that to sort of keep upper management at bay to say: ‘Yes, we are doing that’ but at the end of the day, it is not really the most compelling user experience or just from an integration level it is not really integration. It is just putting a button there. It is better than nothing, but people don’t really respond to it. What we have seen so far is pretty minor jumps into the whole email and social integration.”

How Email and Social Can Work Together

A common marketing mistake is treating email and social too differently. “Figure out how to integrate these marketing channels, instead of isolate them,” recommends Jenkins. “The easiest thing to say is: ‘I’m not going to do this anymore, I am going to do this instead.’ That is pretty foolish, unless you know that whatever you are removing definitely doesn’t work, and that it is not something people care about. Removing email and replacing it with other channels is foolish unless you are losing money with your email programs, which is pretty hard to do, or if you don’t have any subscribers left.”

What are the best ways to integrate social media and email marketing? Begin by taking a look at the similarities, suggests Miller. “There are a number of similarities between the two channels—for one they both have the perception of being free or very inexpensive, but they’re not. Social has a cost in terms of time and resources of employees and content creation. Email is perceived to be very inexpensive, but if you are doing it well, you really need to make an investment, if you want to create actual subscriber-level experiences, rather than batch and blast,” she says. “Another thing they have in common: both are driven by content. The content that you create for your email program is something that becomes an asset for your social program and vice-versa. Content that your employees create for Twitter feeds, or Facebook pages or promotions that are put into communities, or even the customer service Q & A that happens in a community—all this is great content for the email program.”

Daniels agrees that integration over silos is the right approach. “We see social as additive,” he says. Daniels believes direct marketing should incorporate all channels: online, offline, email, social, mobile, with a traditional database marketing foundation—all centered on data. “A lot of the tactics that you need to apply in social or mobile are the same as direct marketing tactics. You have to test. You have to optimize, particularly as you enter a channel like social that may be new to the business. All those rules still apply. It is really about business transformation or change. The company culture has to be ready to accept that and really break down the silos. Today, there is a really strong connection between marketing and customer service, stronger than it’s ever been before.”

As Miller describes it, marketers should think of email as the hub to the other channels because it is especially driven by content. “Email marketers create a tremendous amount of content every week and they have a lot of data on what is welcome by customers and prospects. For business-to-business, they know what whitepapers get downloaded, or which promotions work best and drive the most traffic. With email as the hub, the spokes are your social program, your mobile program, etc. That content drives all that interaction. I think the email marketer is in a really good position to, if not run the social program, at least partner with it in a good way.”

Before You Start

Take time for evaluations, prior to investing in social marketing. It is important to point out that for some businesses, it may not make sense to join in the social media revolution. “You really have to know your audience,” says Jenkins. “Some companies shouldn’t be wasting their energy on social media. Knowing your audience and where they are is very important.”

If you need ammunition for social marketing initiatives, Daniels suggests starting with measuring the value of your email subscriber to your organization. What are email subscribers worth? Determine subscribers that are engaged, those that are clicking, those that are buying consistently and compare to those that are not. “Come up with those two numbers,” he says. “You are going to need that number to get some funding or attention from executives to go out and dabble with social.” Next, Daniels recommends that you look at possible social transactions that happen, and assess if those are in addition or would a subscriber have purchased anyway? Daniels then asks: “What about the other people that the subscribers are bringing in? What is the average cost of acquisition? Flip that to the credit. Are you generating a lot of additional followers?” Daniels believes this exercise can help determine the value of the channel. “Know your share rate, and who the people are that are sharing. Then after that, it would be recognizing those people, and targeting them.”

Building and Using Social Communities

Many marketers build their community through their email files by asking those subscribers to join. Miller points out that businesses can build communities and add to subscriber lists simultaneously. “You can build them back and forth, they are the same people,” she says. “There is a sort of incestuous relationship between your email file and social communities. Those people are the same so marketers must embrace that and say: ‘I am going to communicate with these people in multiple ways’ and then coordinate the messaging.”

Jenkins offers this suggestion for email and social marketing synergy: “A big untapped area is using the social networks to drive email interest.” Jenkins tells of one client (Ted Turners’ restaurant chain Ted’s Montana Grill) as an example of where BrightWave manages both its Facebook page as well as its email program. “To us, it is really the bread and butter of any email program to give something of unique value. So on the Facebook page, where there is close to 10,000 fans, we said: ‘If you are on the email list, you are going to get a great offer next week, no one will get this offer except email subscribers’. We used social to drive subscription interest in the other channel. Most people say: ‘We have this mature email list, we want to drive social.’ But it can work the other way around too. Beyond Facebook, LinkedIn is a great opportunity to further your own personal brand.”

Content Creation

A benefit of social is that there can be a number of content contributors. To Daniels’ earlier point, this is where you see a synergy between different organizations within a company that did not exist in quite this way before. “There is a lot of business-to-business examples of community driven content which is put up by employees that are not in the marketing department,” says Miller. “They are customer service people or product managers.” She offers an example of Cisco as a community that is driven by employees from all over the organization. “All that content is an amazing resource for the email marketer who is trying to come up with nurturing programs. If I download a whitepaper, now what do I get? What information should I receive? When it comes from the product manager, it has a credibility factor, or if it’s a response to a customer question. That is a real asset. So part of it is learning how to reach across the aisle between the social and the email people to embrace each other.”

The goal, according to Jenkins, is to create integrated programs where email is the first part of the message and is extended through social for the second part. “Email is where we get their attention. Facebook is where we then have a conversation with them and get them to engage a little bit further. That is really powerful, otherwise, you are just shouting out—and no matter what business you are in, it is pretty crowded everywhere. Email is the delivery mechanism for a conversation and then social network is where you want that conversation to develop further. This is something that works well for our clients.”

The concept of social is something we have always done. “We have always purchased on the recommendations of other people. How did you find your realtor, or doctor, or appliances?” asks Daniels. “Often these are based on the recommendations of our peers and colleagues. The difference now is that it is highly measurable.” Daniels says that he can point to many different companies that have been able to improve their conversion rates based on reviews used as content. “With social and all this user-generated content, whether on your own site or scrapping it from people that ‘follow’ you or ‘like’ you, you can leverage that content and push it back in an email. Those testimonials are often hard to come by, but they are very powerful. With social, it has really amplified our buying behavior.”

Experts agree that customers interact differently in the different channels, and that it is important that the right voice be used to communicate on Facebook versus Twitter or email. Jenkins reveals that recent research supports the notion that people do not pick one channel over others. “We have a lot of people ask: ‘What if my email subscribers are also Facebook fans or following us on Twitter? We don’t want to just drown them out.’ That is definitely something you want to be aware of. I tell people you want to avoid the cut and paste social marketer approach where you are literally saying the same thing in email, Facebook and Twitter. That really is the wrong approach.” Jenkins believes people that go to different channels are expecting different pieces of information or to be engaged in different ways. “Email is still the first thing people do in the morning; it is where they expect to get special offers and unique content. Facebook is where they expect to get entertained and engaged with the brand in a different way and Twitter is for a smaller subset of people that want real in the know, breaking news information. The people who are really passionate about brands are opting in all those channels and if you are delivering information that fits all those channels, it is going to be a lot more beneficial. You can accomplish a lot more than just sending the same information to all the channels, which deludes your information.”

The point is to make the various channels continue to engage the target customer. It isn’t enough to offer a coupon for $5.00 (USD) in exchange for a ‘like’ on Facebook. While people might respond to acquire the coupon, they may never actually interact. The content strategy is what is going to lead to long-term success. “The natural arch of an email campaign is that usually within three to eight hours you receive 80 to 90 percent of your responses back,” explains Daniels. “But the life of a social campaign can be much longer. With natural evolution, it might be a week or several weeks for that campaign to continue on with a life of its own.” Another content consideration is how we have evolved as communicators. “For marketers to get it right, they have to recognize we are living in a short burst society,” continues Daniels. “More and more, our conversations are defined by status updates, by text messages, and by Twitter making the content of a postcard seem verbose! As a result, make sure there are nuggets of content that can be shared.”

The importance of compelling content only gets stronger with the increase in channels. While marketing nirvana may be viral in nature, Jenkins says: “A lot of people used to say: ‘How do I make my email go viral’, which is kind of vague and impossible. Now the question is: ‘How do I get my email campaigns to be shared, or be socialized?’ It doesn’t really matter what kind of technology, or how many people are on your list, or how many bells and whistles you have, if your content or the value isn’t there. Who and why would anyone want to share it with their friends?” Jenkins believes that people should spend more time on crafting a really valuable and powerful message and less time on how many people might share it on Facebook. “If it is of real value, it will get out there. It is proven every day. That is why email and social make an incredible one-two combo, but if the value isn’t there on either of them, you are missing out.”

Daniels wants to be sure it is understood that the same rules of relevance apply, regardless of channel. “People are going to be more sensitive if you are spewing stuff at them in their own social network, then if you would be sending them email that looks like spam. People will have a greater reaction,” he warns.

Who Owns Social Media?

Within the business, what organization takes ownership of the integrated social and email marketing strategy? Jason Baer of Convince and Convert, a social media consulting firm, notes in his blog: “As I’ve written several times, the people in your company responsible for email, and the people responsible for social media should be the same people. Remember, the first step in social media effectiveness shouldn’t be building an empire of half-baked, free-standing social outposts, but rather determining how to add social frosting to your existing marketing cake.”

The difficulty in answering where the responsibility falls is compounded by the fact that email marketing itself is often still under debate. “Email has never really found a proper home in a lot of companies because it is a blend of technology and marketing,” states Jenkins. “Email has struggled to find the right home. With social I think there is an internal power struggle for where it belongs. One could argue that it is a public relations initiative. Some like Comcast, have made it all about customer service. Dell is using it primarily as a revenue channel. Others are doing social as more of a market awareness, industry thought-leadership type channel. Really we are seeing it in a lot of places, so it will be interesting to see where it ends up.”

Regardless of which organization ends up with social, the important thing is to avoid the silo approach and establish a shared set of business goals to ensure optimizing. For example: Twitter might be managed through a PR person, but the community or Facebook page might be owned by ecommerce or a professional services group.

Increasing Reach

Email will not go away as a result of social adoption. In fact, email marketing is expanded by social, because not only can you send messages to your subscriber list, you can also increase your reach with your social fans, resulting in potentially higher responses. “The beauty of email has always been that it is permission-based,” says Jenkins. “If someone gives you an email address, they have given you permission. Everyone wants to talk about why you should do social more and email less, or instead of email and that to me defeats the whole purpose. It you have people signed up for emails, talk to them one way, or if you have people opting into social networks, talk to them another way. Then you have some amazing opportunities that 10 years ago were unheard of in terms of delivering real measurable performance on your marketing.”

Indeed the title of email service provider (ESP) is now outdated. Daniels calls it a misnomer, because as he points out: “If you are looking for an ESP you need to make sure they have a mobile strategy for you, a social strategy, an email strategy, and that it is all under one unified system. I think we are going to see a lot more consolidation in the space of email plus these other channels. To me, it is all messaging.”

What remains is sorting out the integrated strategy and assessing how to develop the appropriate content for the various channels. “The only reason why a marketer would not try to synergize all their digital channels—search, online advertising, email, mobile, and social—and to have a true multi-channel strategy is resources,” reasons Miller. It benefits the customer to synergize all the content for the different channels, and it benefits the company from a brand standpoint, and a data management standpoint. “As a marketer, I want to be able to manage the interactions and optimize the interactions across all those channels, because that is how I am going to build stronger relationships and sell more. I think there is no question that we have a huge opportunity here.”