The Convergence of Email and Social Media is Coming

The blogosphere is a buzz with tired arguments over whether or not social media signals the death of email. The most recent prediction comes from Matt Cain of Gartner, signaling that "by 2014, social networking services will replace email as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users." This very well might be true, for the 20% that need to collaborate; however, it in no way replaces the need for bi-directional communication.

Anyone who engages in a debate over which channel is superior is approaching this from the wrong angle. Not only do both channels complement each other from a marketing perspective, they are significantly more powerful when used together than either channel alone.  It's also interesting to note that according to a recent Merkle study, social media users are much more active users of email than those who haven't jumped on the social media bandwagon. 

What's most interesting is that while the pundits continue to debate the value of one channel vs. another, the 800-pound gorillas in the email marketing and social media spaces are answering this question for us by taking convergence to the consumer.

In the past few weeks, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have all announced plans to integrate email and social media for their end users. Google and Microsoft plan to integrate social functionality into Gmail and Outlook respectively, and Facebook is rumored to be launching its own webmail service. These announcements are significant in that, if all three are successful, the consumer’s view of email and social media will become highly integrated during the next year or so.

As email marketers, it is important to prepare for this shift by developing an integrated marketing strategy for the two channels now. According to our recent industry survey of more than 1,000 business leaders, 69 percent of businesses are planning on following through with this integration in 2010. Given the opportunity, the figure is not too surprising.

For more information on integrating email and social media, please review the Tip of the Month featured in today's newsletter.

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Automating Email to Drive Revenue and Customer Engagement

Type: On-Demand Event
Date: September 30, 2009

Marketing to customers based on prior actions and purchase history can be a powerful tool for boosting relevancy, conversions and revenue. Integrating this strategy into your transactional email streams, such as confirmations, shipping notices, and password reminders, is a proven technique for improving your bottom line. 

This on-demand event features a full audio/visual recording of the webinar, including the extensive Q&A session.

Stream or download the event today to learn first-hand how an Internet Retailer Top 500 company is leveraging this powerful channel with great success.   

Download Now >>

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Download Now!

According to JupiterResearch, relevant emails drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast mailings. Download this detailed whitepaper and learn four actionable steps for integrating relevant content into your email campaigns, as well as proven strategies for effective targeting and segmentation.

Getting Started with Email and Social Media

If you're like many email marketers, you've read the articles, digested the statistics and recognized the opportunity, but you don't know where to start with email and social media.  The good news is that getting started doesn't have to be that hard.  In fact, taking a phased approach can help make sure you get familiar with the medium before you launch more large-scale programs.

Phase 1
There's one thing that you can easily do right now to extend the reach of your email programs – make the content in your messages shareable.  Adding a share link or button to an email template is an extremely simple process that gives recipients an easy way to share the entire email or specific messages with their social networks. 

The same sharing solutions that you commonly see on websites (Share This, Add This, etc.) can be embedded into your email campaigns.  However, you should also be aware of next-generation sharing tools like StrongMail's Social Notes, which doesn't require the recipient to leave your email or webpage to share – so you don't lose the recipient/web visitor during the process.  These are all free tools that can be easily implemented, so there's no excuse not to get started with this level of sharing.

Phase 2
Once you've got the simple sharing working, it's time to move to the next level – and that involves doing some research to find out what type of content and offers resonate best with key customer segments. You can do this through a variety of ways, both new and old.  The obvious place to look is in conversion metrics – what are your customers clicking on and what content are they interacting with?  These are traditional metrics that should not be overlooked. However, the rise of social media has created another powerful way to gauge what your customers are interested in by listening to them.

Social monitoring solutions from companies like Radian6 can show you what people are saying about your brand, the tone of those comments, and the social websites that are most active in facilitating these discussions. This will help you better understand where most of your customers are hanging out and how to craft messages to reach them there.  The social sharing tools mentioned in Phase 1 should also provide you with reporting on the types of sharing methods used by your customers – are they sharing mainly via email, Facebook, Twitter or another channel?

Additional services from companies like Rapleaf can even take your email file and append it with profile information from the social networks used by your customers.  This information gives you insight into your most connected customers and potential brand influencers, which you can then target with specifically geared viral campaigns.

Phase 3
Once you've indentified your potential influencers, the social networks they participate on, and the types of conversations surfacing around your brand, you are now in a position to create viral campaigns that fully leverage the power of social media. Whereas Phase 1 involves making your content shareable, Phase 3 focuses on making your content "share worthy."  This phase comes down to determining the most effective incentives that will motivate your influencers to share your brand with their networks. We call these incentives "social motivators."

Social motivators can be distilled down into four categories: self expression, achievement, altruism and self-reward. Will your customers be motivated to share if it enables them to reach a new level of membership? Or would launching a campaign that allows them to show off their creativity be more effective?  Are your customers best motivated with a financial reward that is offered to both the sharer and the sharee? Tapping into the right social motivator will help you create a program that will leverage the unique characteristics of your customer base.

The information gathered in Phase 2 is essential in devising an effective offer strategy, but it doesn't eliminate the need to test.  Intuition is no substitute for a good A/B test. Once you've established the winning message or offer, you need to give recipients an easy way to share it and track their behavior.

This is where StrongMail Influencer plays a critical role.  Influencer is a social referral platform that enables you to launch a viral marketing campaign and track the multi-stage sharing behavior to identify which influencers are generating the most value for your brand.  It also promotes follow-on sharing by keeping the recipient informed of how many people responded to the shared information and the progress towards any pre-established reward threshold (e.g. Get a $10 gift certificate for every 5 friends who become members). And, if you would like some custom support, StrongMail offers strategic and creative services to help make your initial campaigns a success.

The bottom-line is that there should be nothing stopping you from beginning to harness the power of social media in your email marketing programs.  Whether you're just starting out or looking to go beyond simple sharing, the right social media marketing partner can you help you reach, engage and convert your customer base.

For more information on integrating social email into your email programs, you can download our white paper, "Email in the Age of Social Media."

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New and Improved Deliverability Tools and a Yahoo Glitch Update

If you know anything about Spamhaus, you know you don't want to be on one of their DNS blocklists. Many ISPs and other receiving domains use Spamhaus' IP-based blocklists to filter their mail, so appearing on one of their lists can have a major impact on your deliverability.  While Spamhaus has traditionally listed offending IP addresses, the company has announced that it is rolling out a Domain Block List (DBL) on March 1. This gives ISPs the ability to scan the content of incoming email messages for listed domains and then classify or block them based on whether they appear on the Spamhaus DBL.

This is a good reminder to continually review your deliverability metrics to catch any spike in blocked messages that might stem from being put on a Spamhaus or any other influential blocklist. If you do find your messages are getting inadvertently blocked, you will want to contact the owner of the blocklist to resolve the problem.  The fact that Spamhaus is rolling out a domain name-based blocklist also calls attention to the increased emphasis that ISPs are playing on sender reputation.  If you think your mailing practices might be pushing the limits of what's acceptable, now is a good time to review them against established best practices.

For those of you who take advantage of Return Path's deliverability tools (or StrongMail's StrongDelivery Tools, which leverages this technology), the company has updated its Microsoft Outlook desktop filter with the latest spam filter heuristics provided by Microsoft.  That means that you can more accurately determine whether your email will land in the Outlook inbox or junk folder – before you send the message to your list. Being able to test how your email message is delivered and rendered in top email clients is an invaluable tool for maximizing the performance of your campaigns.

The final deliverability news comes as a quick update on the Yahoo MTA connectivity problems reported in the last Advisor newsletter.  On January 26, Yahoo reported that it was experiencing connectivity problems that resulted in a "420 Resources unavailable" SMTP error. While the issue appeared to be resolved shortly thereafter, Yahoo reported on February 3 that the problem had reappeared. If you find a number of 420 or 421 errors from Yahoo during February, you may want to retry those messages.

You can keep up with these developments and more by bookmarking or subscribing to StrongMail’s blog, Maximizing Deliverability.

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