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Social media is widely billed as the new paradigm for marketers. Everyone wants a piece of it, but many email marketers are still struggling with how to leverage this new channel to drive greater returns from their existing campaigns. Today, StrongMail announced the results of our first case study on the subject, profiling how personal financial site Mint.com leveraged the two channels together to drive new customer acquisition, and the results are impressive.

First a little background on StrongMail Influencer, a new product from StrongMail that enables email marketers to integrate social functionality into their email marketing campaigns and track the results. Influencer campaigns harness the psychology of the social web to determine what offers will inspire recipients to share a given brand with their friends or colleagues, and provides them with a rich social media interface in which to share. Using Influencer, email marketers can identify, motivate, track and re-market to their top social media influencers to exponentially increase brand engagement and response. Watch a Quick 2-minute Demo >>

Mint.com was trying to increase the size of their user base and wanted to leverage social media to tap the power of their already engaged opt-in list. Working with StrongMail, Mint.com was able to identify key motivators for social sharing among its users, and developed two offers and a control group for an A/B Test. After testing the offers, Mint.com quickly determined the winner, which surprisingly was an offer for free access to beta features. (The other offer was a free iPod for every three friends that signed up.)

Mint.com deployed the winning campaign to the rest of their opt-in list, resulting in a 48% unique open rate. Of those, over 10 percent became "Influencers" for the Mint.com brand by sharing the invitation with an average of 5 friends each, significantly expanding its reach. These invitations generated an unprecedented 61 percent click-through rate among friends viewing the invitation and every 2.6 invite clicks on the invitation led to one friend becoming a Mint.com user. Ultimately, Mint.com was able to generate over 8,000 new accounts as a result of this campaign. A copy of the full case study is posted here, if you would like more detail.

StrongMail is helping email marketers across a wide range of industries drive more value from their email marketing campaigns using StrongMail Influencer. Contact us today if you would like to discuss how we can help you effectively leverage social media to drive increased brand awareness, new customer acquisition, and new revenue.