The Rise of Social CRM Presents New Opportunities for Interactive Marketers

It seems like everyone in the industry is talking about social CRM, but like any new term, the definitions vary wildly. Why should you care about social CRM? In a nutshell, this exciting new field will enable you to integrate social data with your existing customer records for better targeting across all of your marketing programs – especially email marketing.

Social CRM is rooted in the ability to identify and target your most valuable and influential customers.  With 20 percent of your customer base typically accounting for 80 percent of your sales, this insight enables you to start building programs that ignite, engage and influence this powerful segment.  The key to success is accessing the right strategy and tools to capture and apply this data in a way that’s actionable to you.

If you already have a customer relationship management strategy in place, we recommend getting started with social CRM using the following framework:

1. Listen: First you must listen to and understand what types of conversations your customers are having, and specifically, what they're saying about your brand. Insights gained through listening can often identify a shared passion that will be essential in engaging your best customers in ongoing conversations.

2. Learn: If your brand has a loyalty program and robust data, you’re already a step ahead. If not, you’ll want to conduct some proprietary research across your best customers to understand how they use the social web, and to inform your segmentation and marketing strategy further. This research will also be critical in developing enhancements to your existing programs and developing new social programs that not only appeal to your segments, but offer value.

3. Engage: Next, you need to build a truly unique and special experience for them, leveraging all touchpoints: website, email, customer service desk and presence on social networks. Take the time and effort to build a lifecycle communication program for every segment, paying attention to community management. Rethink your loyalty programs — perhaps shift your focus from promotions to rewarding best customers for participating with your brand — be it their community contributions, social network activity or brand advocacy.

4. Influence: As you begin to engage your best customers, don’t forget the “social” in social CRM. Leverage social tools to facilitate and encourage sharing and brand advocacy. Flag and thank active customers, and reward them for their advocacy.

Done successfully, you will be able to create programs and generate conversations targeted to your best customers by not only what segment they fall in, what products they like and how often they use them, but also their email activity, loyalty/purchase activity and social activity. Using this data, you should be able to build algorithms that drive lifetime value and improve campaign and marketing performance across channels.

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An Email Marketer's Guide to Social CRM
Learn proven strategies for enhancing your email and online marketing programs

Type: Live Webinar
Date: Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Time: 11:00am PT / 2:00pm ET

Get up to speed quickly on social CRM and how it can enhance your existing email and online marketing programs. Understand the core tenants and benefits of social CRM from social media marketing experts Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group and Michael Della Penna of ThreadMarketing.

Register Today >>

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Best Practices for Email Opt-in
By Amanda Hinkle, Online Marketing Strategist

All email addresses enter your database through some form of opt-in process. Subscriptions can come in from a website, call center, POS display, trade show, sweepstakes offer, etc. Consumers are opting in to receive information from your organization for a specific purpose – to receive your email campaigns or to manage an existing business relationship.

Forrester Research reports three primary methods that can help increase opt-in rates:

• Make registration easy, intuitive and valuable for the customer
• Give the customer control of how much information they want to share with you
• Start with basic questions and ask for deeper information gradually

Additionally, organizations can make the opt-in process more effective for subscribers by doing any or all of the following:

• Provide an opt-in on every page of your web site
• Include a subscribe link in every email campaign
• Explain the benefits of registering (through a value statement or privacy policy)
• Use standard form field names and limit them to ten questions
• Ask basic segmentation questions
• Avoid asking for sensitive information without cause (such as password reminders, etc.)
• Use a single email confirmation opt-in strategy
• Use viral marketing

According to Forrester Research, more than 60 percent of marketers found that their website registration page proved to be the easiest and most effective way to ask a consumer to opt-in to their email programs. That said, make sure the website opt-in process isn’t convoluted or time consuming for the customer. This will establish a good relationship and heighten your chances of that new subscriber referring friends or colleagues to your organization.

Discounts to Social:Email Marketing 2010 and MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011

According to a June 2010 survey of 1,000 global business leaders, the vast majority of businesses (70%) have employed an email service provider, but the same study finds that a lack of features, limited services and high costs have caused 77 percent of them to switch in the past two years.  And the problem still persists, as 29% of current ESP users plan to switch in the next year.  This high turnover rate represents a significant challenge for marketers to maintain continuity of their email marketing programs. 

Who doesn’t like a good bargain? We invite you to strengthen your email marketing skills with discounted access to the following industry events.

Social:Email Marketing 2010 ~ Sept. 17, 2010
If you're interested in learning how to best integrate social media into your email marketing programs, you should consider attending Social:Email Marketing 2010 this September in San Francisco.  Click the link below and use the "StrongMail10" promo code to secure a 10% discount.
                Register Today >>          
                Promo Code: StrongMail10

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011 ~ Jan. 24 – 26, 2011
An extremely popular and longstanding event for email marketers, the MarketingSherpa Email Summit is moving to Las Vegas for 2011. Save $700 on registration by using the registration link provided below.
                Register Today >>

New Industry Study:
Email Breakthrough Report Q210

Available: Download Now!

Maximize the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns with cutting-edge strategies, best practices and trends from brands like Chase, Disney and Sephora.  Learn how creating an exceptional user experience through innovative design, compelling copy and social media integration can significantly increase the performance of your email program.  Download this free industry report today.

Improving Deliverability with Proper List Hygiene

As mentioned in last month's Advisor, list hygiene plays a key role in email deliverability. However, this critical function is often compromised by other pressing deadlines and priorities – even though it's never been more important to keep your lists clean. With many ISPs now incorporating engagement metrics into how they filter mail and assess sender reputation, companies need to be even more committed to regularly conducting comprehensive list hygiene practices.  Removing bad addresses and unsubscribes is important, but it's not enough. 

With your email deliverability rate on the line, the consequences of sloppy or inconsistent practices can be significant. If you're having a hard time justifying the allocation of resources to this task, make the case by multiplying the value of each subscriber by the potential number of undelivered messages stemming from inadequate practices.

With the proper approach, technology and tools, list hygiene can be a fairly simple process. The following five tips will help you get started.

1. Scrub Your Lists Regularly. Keep your list as clean as possible by regularly running it against a register of known bad domains and role accounts. The volume and frequency of your mailings will determine how often you want to scrub them. Make sure your process goes beyond simply removing duplicate addresses.

2. Remove and/or Correct Bad Domains. Bad domains should be removed or corrected immediately. Closely review your failure reports, identify bad addresses and evaluate whether they are the result of a data capture problem or a non-existent domain. If you’re experiencing a high rate of failures, you’ll want to determine how those addresses got onto your list and if they’re indicative of a data capture problem.

3. Remove Distribution Accounts. Mailing to a distribution account is never a good idea. Many ISPs factor such behavior into your sender reputation. Plus, since it's the equivalent of sending to "occupant" it’s likely to facilitate spam complaints from members of the list. You can easily remove distribution accounts by adding “info@*,” “sales@*,” and other common addresses to your suppression list.

4. Remove Inactive Addresses. Review the email activity of your customers and compare open rates with the frequency of the email sent to them. This will allow you to identify inactive customers, which you can then transfer to another list that is designed to reengage them. You will also want to consider removing customers without any opens or clicks within a 12-month period. Not only are ISPs filtering based on engagement, sending to unengaged users can also increase ISP complaints, making the situation even worse.

5. Use Data Checkers. Employing data verification devices at the point of data collection on your website can ensure that email addresses and other information is properly formatted before it is accepted into the database. Identifying the errors at the point of entry gives you the opportunity to have users correct mistakes as they make them.

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