Blogs

Social CRM is a relatively new term in the world of online marketing, but the concept behind it is based on age-old direct marketing principles. In my most recent column for eM+C, I talk about the importance of social CRM and it should be applied to your best customers.

You can read the article below or click on the following link to read it at eM+C.

http://www.emarketingandcommerce.com/blog/social-crm-starts-with-best-customers

eMarketing & Commerce (eM+C)

Social CRM Starts With Best Customers
July 29, 2010 By Michael Della Penna

I’ve been reading a lot about social CRM recently. Lots of talk about combining data and intelligence from multiple channels, how to merge and understand structured and unstructured data, and the critical role algorithms play in helping brands anticipate a consumer’s next move. But what struck me most while reading through the numerous articles and analyst reports was the apparent lack of focus on identifying and catering to best customers.

If best customers — approximately 20 percent of your customer base — account for 80 percent of sales, then one would think identifying and striving to create a unique experience for those shoppers would be the goal of nearly every marketer on the planet.

While I’m not suggesting brands abandon their efforts to leverage social media to connect, engage and influence all consumers, I am suggesting they think more strategically around identifying best customers and creating unique and special experiences for those customers. So, how should brands approach such efforts? Start with the following basics:

1. Listen: To build a unique and engaging experience, listen to and understand the kinds of conversations customers are having and, specifically, what they're saying about your brand. Insights gained through listening can often identify a shared passion (be it travel, sports, music, finances, etc.) that's essential in engaging 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: By now you’ve gained a good understanding of your key customers and influencers. The next step is 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.

Finally, track and anticipate what’s coming next. The greatest benefit of focusing on your best customers is the ability to manage and execute based off the data. Amazing things begin to emerge when you not only know who your best customers are, 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.

By analyzing this data, leading brands can build algorithms that drive lifetime value and improve campaign and marketing performance across channels. So for all of your thinking about social CRM, remember that the first group you want socializing their experiences with your brand are your best customers. Make their experiences with your brand memorable, and arm them with incentives and tools that enable them to participate and advocate for your brand.

Email marketing and social media are by far the preferred mediums by which consumers and brands connect and communicate. When combined, they offer businesses more ways to interact with customers and gain insights from these conversations to strengthen their relationships with their clients.

However, besides social media marketing and email marketing solutions, businesses increasingly need the right advice and strategies to embrace the social customer. That’s why StrongMail announced today the formation of an integrated email marketing and social CRM agency, ThreadMarketing.

This doesn’t mean that StrongMail will suddenly become a vendor of customer relationship management platforms. That isn’t what Social CRM is all about.

Social CRM is first and foremost about a different perspective on client programs, customer loyalty programs and multi-channel contact moments with the "social customer." It is leveraging the data and insights gained from marketing activities in social channels to build more relevant conversations that drive results.

Traditional CRM has its roots customer service. Social CRM is more of a mindset, whereby the customer experience is placed before all else and the mentality and marketing strategy of businesses is purely aimed at the customer, his needs, preferences and measurable digital signals.

Social CRM: The Management of Customer Experience is Marketing 

In this view, various forms of online marketing such as social media marketing, email marketing, referral marketing etc. are all combined, integrated and adapted into the buying cycle and impact customer satisfaction.

In our increasingly social world, where the consumer uses various channels to call on peers, influencers and communities for advice and sharing, Social CRM provides marketers with an integrated client-oriented strategy of using data and tools to identify participative communities and segments, honor communication preferences and meet customer needs in real-time.

ThreadMarketing: an Integrated Social CRM Strategy for an Integrated Marketing Reality

The final goal of Social CRM thus becomes a data-driven, targeted, participative, two-way and continuous interaction strategy, as personal as possible, whereby the value for the client is central to marketing. CRM becomes a never ending process of conversations, optimization and conversion, with marketers mining the data and leveraging it to improve the effectiveness of their cross-channel marketing initiatives.

That is exactly why StrongMail has formed ThreadMarketing, a new type of agency that empowers Fortune 2000 brands with Social CRM strategies and creative design, while helping them make optimal use of integrated social media marketing, email marketing and other technology solutions. 

Guidance to Improve Conversion, Engagement and Efficiency

Using a powerful framework, ThreadMarketing will help you to Listen, Learn, Engage, and Influence key consumers so you can work smarter not harder. 

ThreadMarketing provides marketers with key services such as strategic consulting, listening and monitoring, proprietary research, segmentation strategy, data collection and surveys, databases and loyalty engine design/development, lifecycle program development, award-winning creative, website development, campaign execution, community management, and innovative loyalty and participatory marketing programs that drive success.

Businesses like Castrol, People.com and Johnson & Johnson have used this guidance to improve the relevance and thus efficiency of their marketing strategies. Combined with the power of our solutions, we offer you all you need to engage your customers in a more effective manor, generating impressive results.

It’s what marketers asked for. It’s what we promise with ThreadMarketing.

There was much chatter among email marketers last week as Ben and Jerry's announced that it was shelving its email newsletter in the UK in favor of social media as a primary channel of communication. The social media purists cheered, saying "I told you so" to the dinosaurs known in their circles as email marketers. The dinosaurs (email marketers) are wondering what in the heck Ben and Jerry's is thinking by shutting off a channel that almost every statistic still says is the preferred method of consumer communication with a brand.

Is Ben and Jerry's move marketing communications brilliance, foreshadowing the demise of email marketing, or is it a foolish over-investment in an unproven channel? I would pose this question: why does it have to be either?

Let the Consumer Chose the Flavor
Last week's announcement stated that Ben and Jerry's "abandoned their email newsletter program in response to feedback from their customers." As email marketers, we have been preaching preference management for years. Preference centers have done a tremendous job helping brands create more relevant communications for subscribers. These preference controls often give consumers the ability to participate in specific communications, request specific content or choose communication channels. So, what if the Ben and Jerry's customer base actually opted for communications via social media and not email? Is this such a bad thing? Does this mean email is dead? Of course not. All it means is that a segment of customers at a given point in time would like to engage with Ben and Jerry's via social channels.

That said, I doubt that 100% of the subscriber base preferred social over email. The wholesale shift from email to social channels could have been driven by resource constraints or a desire to drive media coverage (which worked) for the brand. I think we all need to continue the work email marketers began years ago, allowing customers to give a brand permission to engage them, allow consumers to specify the content and purpose of that engagement and make the communication between brand and customer as relevant as possible.

Freezer Burn
Ever go into the freezer for a pint of Ben and Jerry's only to find freezer burn has ruined your treat? You simply left the ice cream in the freezer too long, untended, uncared for and it went bad. Unfortunately, this happens to email communications all the time. Brands simply do not have the time or resources to keep content fresh. The result is a disengaged subscriber base, lower open, click and engagement rates and eventually an increase in unsubscribes and opt-outs.

As we work with brands in email and social media, one of the greatest opportunities is to leverage emerging channels (Facebook, Twitter, communities) to engage customers who have become disengaged or unresponsive in other channels. Many email marketers have seen click through rates (the true measure of program engagement) drop significantly. Using tools such as Rapleaf, brands can identify subscribers that are non-responders in email yet active on the social web. Once identified, brands can seek to engage these consumers through social channels, increasing overall engagement.

The issue is, if your content is not anticipated and appreciated, it does not matter what channel you leverage for communication, the result will be the same: customers opting out of communications. My point is this - maybe the Ben and Jerry's move was driven by the lack of anticipated and appreciated content in their email newsletter, not the channel itself.

It's the Ice Cream the Consumers Care about, Not the Bowl
Marketers are continually looking at new ways to engage their audiences. Much like Ben and Jerry's, who focuses on developing exciting new flavors that excite their customers' taste buds, marketers are developing new programs that enrich the overall experience between the brand and the consumer. Walk into any ice cream shop and you can choose a sugar cone, safety cone, waffle cone, chocolate covered waffle cone or just a plain old "cup." These "cones" are used to deliver the content, in this case ice cream. A simple cup adds little to the value of the content, where the chocolate-dipped waffle cone adds to the eating experience. Regardless of the delivery vehicle of choice (cup, cone, etc.), the focus is on the ice cream.

As interactive marketers, we need to focus first on the content and then on the delivery channel. The content is the nuts and bolts of what makes our relationship with our customers meaningful. It is driven by data and stored in CRM, loyalty or ecommerce systems. Part of this data should inform the marketer as to how individual customers want to be engaged. Do they prefer to engage via email, social media, postal mail, smoke signals, etc.? Used correctly, this subscription preference data becomes more than just delivery channel information; it allows the brand to add to the value of an overall engagement strategy, much like (at least for me) the chocolate-dipped cone adds to the ice cream.

At the end of the day, as marketers, we should support the customer's preference for communication channel selection and should congratulate Ben and Jerry's for doing just that. As business people, we should question the decision to eliminate the email delivery option for the UK newsletter altogether. After all, I would be plenty upset if I could not get my Chunky Monkey in a chocolate-dipped waffle cone.

Yet another report touting the integration of social and email was released recently by eMarketer. The article shared some ideas and trends around integrating social media and email marketing. However, I would like to ask that we all please stop throwing the term "integration" around so lightly.

The functionality or "integration" points considered in the article are a far cry from truly leveraging the power of Email + Social. "Tweeting" a link to a newsletter or inserting a "share" button on an email is similar to what direct-mail marketers did in the early days of email: Take a direct mail piece, create an HTML version of the mail piece and send it to an email inbox rather than a postal mailbox. True integration should allow marketers to create new workflows that drive customer retention and acquisition.

We are working with a number of clients to truly integrate these channels; consider this scenario:

I visit my favorite online electronics store and purchase a product (let’s call the store "Orange"…I am sitting in line waiting to buy an iPhone 4, so Orange seems appropriate). Within minutes, I receive an email confirmation of purchase (thanks transactional email team).

The confirmation email is dynamic in nature and the template "knows" that I am a preferred customer. (Thanks ecommerce, CRM and email team for creating a relevant and personalized transactional email.)

As a preferred customer, I am presented with a referral offer: "Thanks for purchasing Ryan. We are offering our best customers a $20.00 gift card if you refer your friends to our store. Click here to participate." (Thanks social strategist for understanding that social advocacy starts with a brand's best customers and that rewarding them for their loyalty is key.)

When I click the link, I am told that in addition to my gift card for referring friends, I can earn pay-per-view coupons for DirectTV if I refer three friends or more. I click a link and am presented with an embedded sharing experience that allows me to easily share my brand experience with my friends. (Thanks to the social strategist and CRM team for realizing that I am more likely to refer if my reward is relevant). The store knows I own DirectTV, and I am into movies as I have purchased a number of DVDs in the past year. They use this data to introduce a referral incentive that is personalized to me.

As my friends click the links I share via email, Facebook, Twitter and other channels, they are taken to a landing page that states: "Ryan thought you would appreciate this." (Thanks to the social strategist and web teams for tying my friend's website visit back to me, making it relevant to them.)

As my friends actually purchase based on my referral, the store sends me an email that updates me on my reward status. (Thanks to the email and social teams for understanding that I want to know how close I am to earning my reward.)

Finally, the Brand is tracking all of this activity back to me, the Influencer. They know how many invitations I have sent, how may transactions I am responsible for, and how much revenue my referrals drive. This is all sent back to the CRM systems to be used for future segmentation and program development. (Thanks ecommerce, CRM and email teams for identifying influencers and planning to treat them differently.)

The point is that creating an integrated experience between these channels takes just that – integration (of communication channels, data, site experiences, etc). Let’s not confuse integration with tweaks to template design; they are two very different things. If you are ready for truly integrating, let me know and we can get started right away!

Flash sales are getting a lot of media and retailer attention. Limited-time campaigns are an effective tool in the social commerce arsenal. Hard deadlines compel users to take action. Combined with a sense of unique opportunity and exclusivity, they drive campaign results. Companies such as HauteLook, Gilt, Rue La La, ideeli, and One Kings Lane built their entire business model around members only, limited-time offers.

Email is a great way to make customers aware of limited-time offers. Time sensitivity, however, creates a unique challenge for this type of campaign. The best way to run these campaigns is to deliver email to the entire, large target list within a short time span measured in minutes. Many email platforms work with large lists. However, it is common for larger campaigns to be sent out over a number of hours or even days - not minutes. In many cases, companies have limited control over when precisely their emails will be sent. In multi-tenant ESP environments, clients compete for the same computing resources, making precise scheduling highly challenging. The bottom line – email platforms have not been the most effective in supporting time-sensitive offers. 

This has changed with StrongMail’s addition of email burst capabilities to the Message Studio platform. With these new capabilities, Message Studio has been speed-tested to deliver 2MM+ emails in less than 5 minutes. Just to be clear, we are writing here about permission-based emails received by consumers who registered to gain access to compelling offers.

Customers such as HauteLook are very effectively using StrongMail technology. You can find more details about how HauteLook uses email to drive flash sales on the following industry publications: MediaPost, Internet Retailer and DIRECT.

Social Direct, our social media campaign management solution, is big on reporting and analytics. Results of marketing campaigns are after all what matters the most, and to understand results and impact of marketing efforts you need effective analytical tools. One of the recent additions to Social Direct is a new CMO Summary dashboard report consolidating results of all campaigns managed through Social Direct. This helpful view gives you a good understanding of the overall impact of campaigns run on Facebook and Twitter.

The report analyzes campaigns in three dimensions:

Reach – It is a gauge of how many people your campaigns and posts have touched. It is equivalent to a number of impressions used in the world of advertising. A big difference is the viral component of social media campaigns. Reach is calculated not only by including people directly connected to the brand and thus exposed to its posts (Direct Audience), but also adding those who have been exposed to brand messages re-tweeted or reposted by others (Extended Audience).

Engagement – It is a measure of consumers’ interactions with campaigns. Clicks on links included in the campaign posts, sharing activity (re-tweeting and reposting), as well as comments and 'Likes' associated with Facebook campaign posts are aggregated across all campaigns.

Conversions – For Direct Marketing campaigns, this is the most significant measure of campaign success. Conversion events (purchase, subscription, lead capture, etc.) are tracked on the landing pages that consumers are driven to by the campaign posts. 

The CMO Summary dashboard report provides an executive-level snapshot and allows you to answer big picture questions on the impact of social media marketing efforts.

If your company is not using Facebook as part of its marketing strategy, or you don’t have a social media plan in place, listen up.  Last week, Facebook unveiled advances in its developer toolkit that gives your website visitors a simple way to connect the content on your site with their network of friends – all without leaving your website.  You can then use those connections to provide more personalized, relevant content across your site and your users' Facebook profile.

So what are the new developer tools?  The Open Graph protocol lets developers turn a website’s pages into objects that can be added to a Facebook profile. The social plugins bring Facebook’s features to a website.  Let’s focus on the social plugins.

With one line of HTML code, companies can now include Facebook’s “Like” button on their web pages, which will allow users to post that affinity back to their Facebook profile.  And when a user clicks “Like,” the company gets a link from the user’s profile, the ability to publish to the user’s News Feed, inclusion in Facebook search, and analytics.

Other plugins create a more engaging experience for your users without ever leaving your website.  The Activity Feed shows users what their friends are doing on your site through likes and comments.  The Recommendations plugin gives users personalized suggestions by highlighting content based on the top "Likes" across a site.

Some examples from the Facebook blog help put this into perspective:

1. For example, if I like a pair of jeans on Levis.com, my action will be shared with my friends on Facebook, where they can comment on it. I can also see which of my friends like the jeans on Levis.com.
2. In other cases, I may want to create a more lasting connection to something, such as a book, band or movie. So, if I like the movie "The Godfather" on IMDb, it will be added to my profile as an interest on my “Info” tab. Once the connection is made, “The Godfather” page can send me updates through News Feed (such as a Godfather movie event), and it will appear in search results.
3. When you’re logged into Facebook and visit CNN.com, you will instantly see the articles and topics your friends are sharing, recommending and commenting on via the Activity Feed.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the new tools will help fulfill the company’s vision of the “social graph,” which allows people to share the connections they make on any website with their friends on Facebook. “We are making it so all websites can work together to build a more comprehensive map of connections and create better, more social experiences for everyone,”  wrote Zuckerberg on his blog.

As Facebook’s social-networking features become further integrated into other websites, the company is positioning itself as the substrate for all things social.  As such, I believe we’ll begin to see companies turn to Facebook as the central repository for people's tastes and other socially identifying elements.  I know, a bold statement.  But it’s definitely hot right now – and by creating partnerships with sites like Microsoft's Docs.com, reviews site Yelp, and music site Pandora – Facebook is doing a good job of paving the way for other organizations to want to jump on board.

So what are you waiting for?  Belly up to the bar and solidify your social marketing plan.  Don’t know where to start? Experts from StrongMail can help you put a plan in place. It’s a great way to expand your reach, get users engaged with your product or services, and show that your products are validated by potential customers’ social circles. And the more people that come back to your site, the more connections that will be made.  As I say to most organizations – get on the train before it leaves without you.

There's a lot of buzz around social media marketing right now, but don't let all the excitement cause you to view it in isolation of your other channels. Integrating social media marketing into your email marketing programs can be an effective way to improve their performance and expand your reach.

To find out more information on how email marketers can leverage social media, I encourage you to read my recent article in 1to1 Media, "The Top 3 Social Media Strategies Every Email Marketer Should Know."

Do you recall your first few weeks at your current job? Or maybe the last time you were assigned a major project at the office? There seems to always be that “Honeymoon” period at the start of each new gig. Sometimes it’s a few days. Sometimes it’s as much as a month. But, eventually, it ends. There comes a time when the “ramp-up” period expires, and your boss, peers, customers, etc., expect results – tangible progress towards a clearly define goal.

Well, that time has come for social media marketing. Marketers have spent the last few years slowly integrating the social web into their programs. The majority of early investments went to “proof of concepts,” “trials,” and other “tests” of the potential impact for social channels to enhance program performance. As 2010 rolls on, the trials, tests and POC’s have come to a close, and the results are driving increased investment in social media marketing. But these investments come with increased expectations around accountability of social channels.

StrongMail understands the marketer’s need for transparency within social programs and is thrilled to introduce Social Studio, a first of its kind platform that brings accountability to social media by providing the social media marketer with tools that track all elements of a social campaign, from multi-generational sharing to conversions – all while helping to identify and assign value to influencers within a brand’s customer database.

We all love social media, but love is not enough. Social media has to show up every day and contribute to the bottom line. The honeymoon is over, and Social Studio is here to help marketers hold the channel accountable.

Visit our Social Studio page today and register for a free 14-day trial of Social Studio. Don’t let one of the most promising new channels in the marketer’s arsenal slack off on the job!

As the popular saying goes, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Someone is going to pay for all of this social computing... and whether privacy advocates like it or not, that payment is going to be made using people's data. However, the immense amount of rich data that's available on the social web would be squandered if it was simply used for targeted advertising.

Let's face it. People don't like advertising. They try and avoid it at all costs. They fast forward through commercials on their DVR and use pop-up blockers in their web browsers. The reason Facebook ads aren't living up to their potential is because people haven't opted-in to receive those messages... they don't want to see them!

So when Facebook shoves an ad in front of someone's face that says "35 Year Old Women in San Francisco Needed," they are trying to shoehorn relevant attributes about the visitor into an irrelevant ad. (Not to mention you are going to risk offending the woman by using her age in the ad. No woman wants to be reminded about how old she is, thank you very much.)

What’s even more disturbing are some of the more intrusive applications being created using Facebook Connect. No one wants to see what they thought was a private picture of their family staring back at them from a third party promotional application... whether it be for a video game or the Olympics. It's creepy.

Social Media is More Like Email Than You Realize
Conversely, by approaching social media as an opt-in channel, you are respecting the individuals that you're trying to target and are only communicating with those who are interested in hearing from you. This conforms with the spirit of social media and aligns with email marketing best practices. As any email marketer will tell you, opt-in marketing is significantly more effective than blasting a mass message to a rented list of names that someone claims has similar interests as what you're trying to market.

The social media marketing tools that emerge as effective will respect this and enable marketers to engage with brand influencers in a meaningful and effective way.  This effort will be fueled by personal referrals and genuine recommendations that ring true because the people recommending your product or service genuinely care about it. The future of social media marketing has more to learn from email than advertising. It's about respect. Not violating my privacy and creeping me out.