Unfortunately the same types of measures in SEO and PPC don’t work the same way for your efforts in Social Media Marketing.  It’s a lot more complex because engagement in social media communities very rarely leads to a person clicking on your link and then purchasing your product or service.  You also have to factor into the whole scheme of measuring your actions online whether its SEO, PPC or media buying, was that “Click” affected by something you did in Social Media.

Different Types of Social Media Measured in Different Ways

Take for example engagement in forums.  Say you have a team from your engineering department out in a Ruby on Rails forum discussing the latest things they’ve implemented using RoR.  Someone who’s been lurking and watching your team share it’s knowledge posts a reply in the thread saying “hey thanks, you guys really seem to know your stuff, this helped me a lot”.  The next thing that person does is looks at one of your team’s bios.  They then look at their profile on LinkedIn, then look at your company’s profile on LinkedIn.  From their they click over to your blog and read a few of your thought leadership posts.  After they read those posts, they forward one on to their managing direct with a note that says “these guys seem to really know their stuff, can we utilize them to help us XYZ project?”.

The managing director was looking at other companies to help and had never heard of your company until his engineer suggested your blog post.  Now he’s looking at your company’s profile on LinkedIn, not only that he’s checking out who recommended you and those companies to see if they are like his company.  He then clicks on a link to your latest presentation on Slideshare, he passes that on to the CTO, saying “this company is really impressive, I think we should use them with XYZ project”.

Now the CTO is checking your company out, he’s reading your blog too, but he’s checking out the comments from other companies on your blog and your interaction.  He clicks on a link to your tweet stream and sees you’re interacting and sharing your knowledge with the community about relevant topics, not what you sang in the shower.  Now, he too is impressed, he emals back to the managing director “please contact them and set up a meeting, you’re right they really seem to understand our industry very well”.

The managing director now types into Google your company name, first he clicks on a PPC ad you have (by mistake), then backs up and clicks on the first result, which leads him to your homepage.  He finds the link to fill out the contact form, and now you have a lead.

Figuring Out Which Marketing Channel to Credit Can Be Tough

So who gets the credit?  If you were just looking at analytics, some may say PPC, some may say SEO – never did any of the people click into your site first.  Their first encounter was in a forum about Ruby on Rails, their next was LinkedIn, then your blog, then SlideShare, then Twitter.  The last steps were search and then the click into your site to fill out the contact form.

Sometimes it is pretty easy, you can see a click to a product from a link on Facebook, Twitter or a blog post and can see the results.  However, more often than not, the above scenario that I just outlined for you happens hundreds, if not thousands of times a day online.  Marketers just aren’t aware of all the steps customers are taking to get to the “conversion”.  So how are you measuring that?  Are you accounting for this type of scenario in your ROI or bottom line of your entire marketing plan?

Just because social media marketing doesn’t lead to that instant “Click Conversion” doesn’t mean it isn’t working, it means you have to work a little harder to measure its success.

When it comes to social media  and integrated marketing, unless you have a plan to measure what your are doing how will you know?  There’s a lot to be said about knowing where your audience is, understanding how they talk about you, planning your social media strategy, getting something to go “viral”, accepting the negative with the positive, throwing up social media tactics like spaghetti against the wall.  It’s subjects we’ve talked about here at Da Li Social Integrated Marketing, but unless you have a plan to measure what you are attempting to do, you’ll never know if what you are doing is worth the investment you are putting into it.

While there’s a lot of numbers counting, and those numbers can be very subjective, you still need to have a social media or integrated marketing measurement plan.  For example, counting the number of Twitter followers you have, isn’t really a great measure if you want to measure the quality of your reach. However if you are just starting up a Twitter account, monitoring and counting how many followers you are attaining on a daily or weekly basis can be decent way of gauging how you are progressing in the beginning.  Once you reach a certain threshold, counting the number of followers can be and overwhelming task to keep up with and weed out the spammers.  It’s the same for counting the number of fans you have, or friends on other social networking sites.  It can be a good “check” but it can’t be the be all end all to your measurement plan.

A social media marketing measurement plan needs to include a lot of checks and balances.  For example, how do you know if the content you are creating is really valuable to your audience?  Do you count the number of retweets you get?  Or is it the number of retweets from those “quality” followers that you’ve predefined on a list.  Maybe it’s the number of times your content has been embedded?  Perhaps the amount of traffic that is being driven to your page, or maybe even adding in how much time on site do the visitors coming into the content are averaging.

Then there’s the whole integration with “offline”, if you have those types of measurement.  Even if you are an online business, you likely still need to track something offline.  How are people hearing about you?  Did someone tell them to come to your Facebook page while they talked on a flight to San Diego?  Maybe they sat next to someone at a Coyotes hockey game and it was suggested they check out your video.  How do you account for and measure those aspects of your social media marketing efforts?

When it comes down to it, if you can’t measure it, you need to ask yourself if you should be really implementing that particular social media tactic?

Putting together a social media measurement plan should be an integral part of your social media strategy.  It makes sure your entire team is on the same page when it comes to what and how things are going to be measured.  It also gives your team the ammunition they need to prove or disprove that something is working to help or harm your brand or company.  How you are measuring is just as important as what you are measuring as well.  This is why it’s important that everyone from the C-Suite executives to your data analytics teams understand what the end goals are and what & how you are measuring to see if your efforts are helping you meet those goals.

At the end of the day do you want to really be answering the question from your CMO “Well why are we still doing this?” with “Well because Oprah’s on Twitter now!” ?

Child With Measuring Book Photo Credit:  Flickr User Goldberg

Archeology Team Measuring Photo Credit:  Flickr User Wessex Archeology

Social Media is a free marketing tool, isn’t it? In the very basic sense of examining it, yes “social media” can be seen as a free marketing tool because there’s very little to no outlay of monetary funds.  Participating in social media, if you are a community member, 9 times out of 10, is at no cost to you from the perspective of joining and engaging.  The only time these social media communities charge a fee is if you are upgrading to some sort of premium or pro account.  Think about Flickr in this case, if you don’t want to be limited on your daily uploads or want the analytics, you have to upgrade to the professional account.

From the community participant’s end, this is wonderful!  I get to share and connect with people who have the same interests as me without having to pay a fee, who doesn’t like that concept?  That’s why social media communities have been around long before the term “social media” had ever been coined.

Companies stepping into the idea of marketing in these social media communities with the mistaken idea that marketing within social media communities is “free” are a lot of times sadly mistaken at the end of their campaign’s run.  They find it’s failed, or rather they are under the impression that their marketing attempt failed and they also find there’s a lot more involved than they ever realized.  At the end of the day it isn’t free.  There’s a whole lot of investment that needs to go on in both resources and technology.

It really makes me curious why companies think they can just put up a Twitter account or a Facebook fan page and think “this is going to work” immediately.  A “Field of Dreams” Social Media is not, unfortunately if you build it, most likely they won’t come.  Companies spend millions developing new logos, planning public relations (PR) Events, doing keyword research for SEO and PPC, why should the concepts around social media marketing be any different?  The “free” barrier to entry is a huge misnomer and misleads a lot of marketing departments down the wrong path.

So what should a company plan to invest in when looking at a social media strategy?  Well that really depends a lot on what the company hopes to establish in the medium.  Is it increased buzz or brand lift?  How about increased sales or traffic to the site?  Could you want people to sign up for your email list, blog RSS or coupon distribution?  Become part of your own community?  Different goals require different strategies in social media, and they all require different levels and types of resource investment.

Here’s a quick list to keep in mind of what you’ll be investing in when you decide that social media is the next medium your company should become actively involved in.

• Investing in Understanding:   “Where Are We Now” in the Whole Social Media Sphere

  Do people even know who you are?  Is there any buzz about you?  Do they know the products you sell or the services you offer?

• Invest in Finding Your Audience

  Where are the conversations happening?  Who’s doing the talking about you?

• Invest in the Approach

  How do I interact with the social media communities that are talking about me, my industry, products or services?  How do I add value to their lives and not just be another “noise channel”

• Goals & Measurement Need Investment

  Free tools verses Paid Tools?  Free buzz monitoring tools give you limited data, can your strategy work with that limited data, or do you need more robust information?  What about your analytics, are the free tools going to give you enough information to connect the dots of traffic to buzz & engagement to conversions?  Have you even taken the time to plan what goals will make you successful?

• Employees are as Social Media Investment in their own right

  You pay your employees a salary or an hourly wage to preform tasks for you.  If one of their tasks has to do with social media, that’s definitely an investment that isn’t free by any means.  However, it isn’t just their time engaging you should be planning for, it’s their time researching, setting goals, training, developing and ultimately fortifying relationships with your audience that you really need to plan for investing in.

With investment in research, strategy and measurement companies can see return, or at least if there isn’t a return they can figure out why.  The investment of time and resources from the onset is likely the biggest factor of whether a company is going to succeed or fail.  Don’t you want the money and time you’ve invested to grow your social media strategy into a success rather than just having spaghetti being thrown at the wall?

Scrabble Letters Photo Credit:  Flickr User WonderWebby

Tree & Coins Photo Credit:  Flickr User Pfala

On the other hand, the marketing tactic could be even more of a success than you imagined.  The question then comes to any company – “Are You Flexible Enough in Your Social Media Marketing Strategy to Change & Adapt to Those Conditions?”

Can You Plan to Be Nimble and Integrate Your Marketing Strategies?

Some companies have internal politics that make it nearly impossible to be nimble enough to quickly adapt to the changes that happen in social media.  There are budget constraints, signatures that need to be obtained or a bunch of other hoops that a social media marketing team must go through in order to change parts of their strategies on the fly.  This is where mid-sized to small-sized businesses have an advantage to super big corporations, a lot of times it’s a quick phone call or email to get that change done, not a check list of permissions that need to be obtained.

The key for these bigger corporations to be able to be flexible is to plan in flexibility if they can and to also educate senior management about the entire social media environment.  If they understand that you are monitoring and measuring closely and need to be able to stop or invest more into something within a short time frame and have the data to back that up, they may be more willing to allow for more flexibility and less rigid processes for your strategy.

Don’t Be Afraid to Stop

When something isn’t working, why would you want to keep doing it?  It’s a lot like beating your head against a brick wall, you’re not going to move the wall, you’re only going to get a bruised forehead & a headache.  If you have the data to tell you that the tactic you are implementing isn’t meeting the success measurements or helping you to attain the goals you set in place, you need to be nimble enough to either change the approach slightly or stop it all together and even replace it with putting more investments and resources into other tactics that are hitting their success metrics.

Continuing to deploy and invest in social media marketing tactics that aren’t working just because they are cool or you like them a lot and feel comfortable in that community, is likely only prolonging the failure and wasting your valuable resources.  You’ll get more out of being nimble and flexible enough to adapt and invest in places that are garnering your more engagement and success than in places that you merely feel comfortable with but aren’t producing for you.  This is why its important to diversify your strategy with a few marketing tactics and not to fall in love with one or two particular sites, tools or tactics.

Be Ready to Invest in What’s Working

Sometimes a particular marketing tactic can work a lot better than what you had even expected.  Those are the nice kind of surprises that marketers like to experience.  If something does take off and works like gangbusters in your strategy are you prepared to invest more time, resources and money to further enhance the success of what’s working so well?  Do you also readjust your goals, the amounts invested and time you are allowing the program to run?

Being able to plan into your strategy the ability to change rather quickly is important for the success of your plan.  It’s especially important to be able to take advantage of things that are working better than expected, or if there’s a new opportunity with a feature or a tool.  Sometimes implementing new tools can make your team even more efficient and free up some time and resources, so can you then dedicate that newly freed up time and resources into current tactics or implement new ones?  These are things that your team should be looking at when you are first planning your strategy.

At the end of the day if you can plan in some “padding” into your strategy that will allow you to be flexible you’ll be better able to adapt to the every changing social media marketing world.  If you educate your C-Suite about the way social media can change but show them you have the data to back up the reason for changes, you’ll end up being more nimble and better able to adapt and find a lot more success in your future

Unfortunately for a lot of companies, even the most conservative ones, that lure is too strong and they slap up a Facebook page or a Twitter account without thinking about forming a strategy around it.

Understanding that marketing in social media communities is unique to each and every company is a giant step in the right direction of success. No two audiences are the same even if they are competitors. The philosophy of the company, the way employees interact with customers and even the look and feel of a product can all affect who is in your audience. Not only that, audiences online are different than those offline and its likely that you and your competition appeal to two entirely different audiences within the different social media sites.

All of this means that there’s no cookie cutter approach to creating a successful Social Media Strategy. For every company the approach is unique to their own business and customers. Taking the time to do research will help point you in the right direction of where the conversations are, who are the influencers you need to connect with and what should be your success/failure measurements. There’s no out of the box solution for this, every company will have different results and different ways to implement common social media tools and sites.

Don’t fall for the hype of the shiny new social media objects, in the end it actually cost you a lot more than it would to take the time to formulate your own successful social media marketing strategy

Doe Going Viral Really Spell Success?

We all want to “go viral” right?  In the world of social media marketing, word of mouth marketing or link baiting, one of the ultimate attainments of any marketer is to claim that you had one of your social media content pieces “go viral”.  Going Viral means that your content that you’ve provided to your audience whether it’s a video, a blog post, an audio clip, an interactive flash game or even a photo has really connected with your audience enough that they have felt the need to pass it on, and their audiences have passed it on and so forth that this “spread” or “viral” passing on is now bring you new visitors to your content (and hopefully your site) in masses that are not normally seen to your site.

Content Going Viral is Great! – Right?!

I ask this because in most cases when something catches on or “goes viral” it happens by happenstance, accident or just pure luck.  Companies put something out on their site with no plans on how to capitalize on the attention a media content piece gets once it does go viral.  There’s no goals set, there’s no actions to be taken, there’s no accountability.  Let’s just “shoot video” and put it out there.  Let’s just make this cool game and put it out there!  People will love it and people will come to our site.

Great! Awesome! Boo-Yah!  They love it, they come to your site, they see your picture, watch your video or play your animated flash game, but what do they do next after maybe sharing it with their friends?

How Are You Measuring Your Viral Marketing Success?

While gaining links to your viral content is cool and while attracting the people to your site through viral content is cool, at the end of the day has it done anything to lift your brand perception or raise your bottom line by those visitors doing some other action other than viewing the viral content?  As someone who came from the search engine optimization (SEO) world I understand the implications of gaining links via viral content, and the affects of the influx of traffic can have.  But here’s the thing, are the links really pointing to the content you really want to be known for, or is it just for that one viral piece.

There’s a colleague of mine in the search marketing industry who created this flash game for Christmas time.  This flash game hit it viral pretty big and every year around this time, he sees the traffic spike again because people love to play this game that involves reindeer and Santa.  All of a sudden around November it’s “new” again and people pass around the link.  The game draws a lot of traffic to the page and that page has gotten a lot of links.  You think that would be awesome right?

Here’s the reality of the viral piece – All of that “Viral Traffic” hasn’t lead to any major leads or conversions for what he sells.

The game has nothing to really do with their business.  The people who play the game aren’t really their target audience.  There’s no action at the end of the game to encourage the player to visit just what their product can do.  The game itself has nothing to do with what the company sells.  While his “time on site” statistic and “new visitor” statistic rises, that’s not really telling the full story.  Of course they are going to rise because people are playing the game and passing it on to their friends – they aren’t rising because they are interested in the company’s products or services.

So when it comes to wanting successful “viral” content, there’s got to be a integrated marketing strategy spelled out.  Writing a list about top 10 Thanksgiving cooking disasters isn’t great viral content for an automotive parts site, but it could be for a company that sells pots and pans.  Make sure you plan out your online marekting strategy when it comes to creating viral content, too, not just let it be another list item in the list of marketing tactics your agency has told you to deploy.  While accidental “viral” content can be seen as “hip & cool”, and maybe you might not have planned for it to go “viral”, you can still have it benefit your bottom line.  Take some time to figure out how it can positively affect your company, brand, products or services and re-adjust that “accidental viral content”.

If you are planning as part of your social media strategy to create viral content, make sure you look at all aspects of how it can positively affect your bottom line.  From increased subscribers to your blog to purchases on your site, make your viral content work for you, not against you!

There are a lot of tools out there on the market that can help marketers understand what’s going on in the world around them, particularly online.  Buzz monitoring and the tools you need to use to monitor the key words and key phrases that are important to any online marketing strategy whether it’s Pay Per Click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), eMail (yes, it’s still alive and kicking!) and even Affiliate Marketing  are vital to putting your strategies on the right paths to success.

However, where buzz monitoring tools can play a significant, foundational role, is with Social Media Marketing.  Buzz monitoring tools, whether they are your basic entry level tools like Google alerts, or enterprise level, such as Alterian’s SM2 can give you insight into things you would never find just by using a search engine.

That being said, buzz monitoring tools may seem like a god-send for any marketing researching planning or beginning to plan a social media marketing strategy.  However, marketers need to keep in mind, buzz monitoring tools cannot tell you everything.  They certainly can give you the “scent” of the conversation, but there’s a lot anyone can miss if they rely solely on buzz monitoring tools alone to set up their social media strategy, pick marketing tactics and set goals and metrics by.

Buzz Monitoring Tools Give You the Basics, Not All the Answers

Buzz monitoring tools give you the essential, basic information you need about the conversations swirling around the chosen key words or phrases you are monitoring.  Unfortunately, sometimes even the basics can be misleading, especially when it comes to sentiment.  Unless you have a buzz monitoring tool that allows you to change the dictionary in the sentiment area, you could either be falling down a lot of rabbit holes or worse yet, missing some conversations entirely because your buzz monitoring tool placed the conversations into the “general” or “neutral” area.  Your bare bones buzz monitoring tools, like Google Alerts, don’t even give you the option of sentiment analysis, so when using that tool, you really are at the basics of buzz monitoring.

• The Tools Tell You What

  Any of these buzz monitoring tools will tell you either in a long or brief description, what’s being said around the words or phrases you are choosing to monitor for your strategy.  That’s a basic need of any strategy.  Understanding what’s being said about you, your company or it’s products or services is vital, without it you are pretty much operating in the dark.

• The Tools Tell You When

  Did the conversation happen withing the last 24 hours, or the last month or the past year.  Depending on the tool you use, will depend on how far back your research in buzz monitoring can take you.  Some tools can go back into the databases for as long as they’ve been collecting data.  Others limit you to 90 day, 6 months or a year.  Google alerts will let you go back as far as it has the data, however, that’s very manually intensive work for anyone on your team.  Deciding on how long to look back at is important too.  90 days (or 3 months) can be a relatively short space of time that you won’t be able to see the ebbing and flowing of conversations, on the other hand going back 2years could be too much data and overwhelm your researchers..

• The Tools Tell You Where

  Buzz monitoring tools also give you a vital clue, or a scent / trail to follow by telling you where the conversations are happening.  However, that being said, marketers doing research have to keep in mind, sometimes buzz monitoring tools cannot get into each and every niche forum.  If they are behind a “walled garden”, where usernames and passwords are required, those conversations generally will not come up in the buzz monitoring results.  While buzz monitoring tools can give you a pretty detailed pointer to go and look at a particular thread in a particular community, or a tweet stream, or a Facebook page, no one tool is going to tell you where every conversation that has gone on..

• The Tools Tell You Who

  Finally, buzz monitoring tools can tell you who is talking about you.  For the most part you can at least see the major players in the conversations about the words you are monitoring.  Now they aren’t going to tell you name, address, phone number and email.  However, they will tell you their twitter name, blog URL, avatar/moniker in a forum  and some  tools might even give you an idea of how influential the conversationalist is.  This can help you a lot in your research in deciding how to approach and engage with different individuals.

What Buzz Monitoring Can’t Tell You: How or Why

The missing pieces with buzz monitoring tools is the how and the why conversations are triggered.  How did the buzz about your product get started?  Why did someone feel compelled to share a conversation in a forum?  These questions are also very basic and fundamental pieces of research that should be answered before you pick any online marketing tactic to place in your social media marketing strategy.

Buzz monitoring tools are great at pointing you in the right direction.  Much like a hunting dog aids the hunter, they are indispensable tools you need to get the job done.  Without them, you wouldn’t be able to know the conversations go on at all.  But just as important as knowing Who,What, When & Where is the “How” and the “Why“, and to understand those you need human analysis.  Someone actually needs to go in and perhaps watch or lurk, as well as listen and learn in a community to get a feel why conversations happen they way they do.  They might even need to ask questions of your targeted community’s participants to get a better handle on how they originally found out about your product or service.

Don't Let Fear Paralyze Social Media Efforts

Almost every company has it when they take one look at what’s going on in social media. The question is whether you embrace it or run from it.

Fear of the unknown, of what “could” happen stops a lot of companies right in their tracks. It also has them making a lot of crazy decisions when it comes to their own internal social media policies.

There’s two pieces to fear in social media that can really hold a company back from being successful with their online marketing strategies. The first piece is being afraid of what your employees are doing online. This fear causes companies to restrict access to the internet. At Search Engine Strategies in New York in March 2010, keynote speaker David Meerman Scott said that 25% of companies restrict their employees access to the internet. Instead of looking at it as an asset, these companies are fearful of what “could” happen.

The second piece is fear of what people are saying in these social media communities, fear of them getting the message wrong or saying something bad. They site this as their reason for not getting involved with social media, or taking an approach of “telling” their customers online things, instead of listening and engaging. They are fearful of how customers are engaging with their products because they want it to be all about those carefully crafted and fine tuned messages they put out.

As David Meerman Scott pointed out one company that wasn’t afraid of “loosing control” during his keynote. Let’s face it, toilets aren’t sexy, toilets are pretty darn boring, you don’t think about them and you really don’t see them in commercials on TV. They are really more like a commodity, they are something you need to have and that’s that.

Toilet manufacturer CWS decided to just “loose control” and have some fun and created a commercial which went viral on YouTube. Not only did it go viral, but it managed to change the perception around their products and it has helped to increase their sales.

If a toilet manufacturer can loose control and find success in social media, I think it goes to show that just about anyone can.  You just need to “loose the fear”.

What's the Value of a Like?

We all want to be liked, right?  We need to feel that sense of community and when someone likes us, that makes us feel like we belong to something greater.  Its the same in social media communities as well.  As individuals we want to know that what we are sharing, people are finding valuable enough to share with others and thus liking not only ourselves but what we contribute to the social groups we find ourselves in.

As individuals, people, human beings … -we- -get- -that-.

Businesses, not so much.

Radio Silence Doesn’t Get You Much

At any given time you can find numerous ads on your Facebook news feed screaming at you to “Like Us”.  On printed literature, billboards, commercials and even radio spots you hear “Like Us”, “Follow Us”, “Become Our Friend”.  People generally hit the like button because they are attached in some way to a brand, a concept, or and idea.  But what happens after they hit that like button. 9 times out of 10, … its this:

Crickets Chirping

Businesses don’t engage with those who are liking them.  They just have a fan page, or a twitter account because they were told somewhere along the line that they needed to have this new social media thing.  So if all you are getting is a raw number of fans only clicking a button, what’s the point?

Understand the Value of Your Fans, Friends & Followers

When you engage as a business with your community, you provide them value.  When you provide your community value, they want to share you with their network of friends, family members, and colleagues.  Does your business truly  understand the value of that?

You can work out fancy formulas to give a monetary value to each friend, fan or follower you acquire, but businesses really need to understand the conceptual value of building a fan base and utilize it to drive value -and revenue- back into the business.  When you engage with your fanbase, what happens?

• Do you know if your traffic increases to your site?
• Is what your engaging your audience with getting shared on:
• Facebook walls
• Sent in emails
• Retweeted
• Added to Google Plus
• Sent to Groups in LinkedIn
• Placed into StumbleUpon
• Added to a Stack in Delicious
• Pinned on Pinterest
• How does the value you provide spread among your followers networks and at the end of the day, will that exposure bring you new business?

Providing content that resonates with your fanbase is vital, and not just text content but audio and visual content as well.  You can’t just say “Like Us” anymore.  Or even “Like XXX, Like Us Too!”.  Social Media users are becoming savvier by the day and if you are just paying for the raw number of attaining fans/friends and not providing some kind of value, you are essentially loosing money – you paid for something (those likes) and you aren’t utilizing them to their ultimate potential.

Mark Twain's Letter

Mark Twain once wrote in a letter in 1897, “…the report of my death was an exaggeration.” This too can be said of email with so many experts proclaiming its demise. The reality is, email marketing isn’t dying just yet, but it is changing. It’s becoming more efficient, especially when integrated with your other marketing channels. The trick to being successful at it in today’s socially-engaged world is that the marketer has to understand their audience, not just a demographic.

With the growth of social media, experts were proclaiming that surely this was the channel that would kill off email. That couldn’t be further from the truth. People still subscribe to email lists because they want to get that information right to their desktop; they don’t want to have to go out and search a social community or go to a search engine to find the information that they are interested in. There’s a convenience factor to email that a large segment of the general population still finds attractive.

Unfortunately for the user, there’s no way to communicate back with an email in a way that appeals to social channels, and most emails come from a generic email address that a human doesn’t man. This is where integration comes into play. Remember with your email list you already have a captive audience that is interested in your message; make sure that you give them every opportunity that’s available to become engaged with you. This means using a more enhanced means of email marketing than the old-style “list serve” system.

Email Marketing Has Become “Socialized”

No longer is email marketing about a plain text email being sent out, which is why the rise of very affordable email services like MailChimp, Blue Sky Factory, and Constant Contact has taken place. These types of services offer an array of “social add-ons” where you can make sure your email marketing message can be engaged with on your available social channels. They also make it easy for any small business owner to launch a socially-engaged email campaign.

Some of these services allow you to segment your email lists by way of how subscribers are socially engaged. For example, if you were running a specific campaign just on Facebook, you could send out a very targeted email campaign to subscribers on your list that also use Facebook with that same email address.

Integrating With More Analytics Than Ever

Any of the email services that offer the social media add-on also offer some very slick analytics. Paying attention to these analytics will help you in the long run of building a successful email marketing campaign. You’ll be able to see not just open rates, but on which links your subscribers are clicking on that aren’t going directly to your site.

When you combine those analytics with analytics from your website and insights from other social channels such as Facebook or social media monitoring services, you’ll be able to see just how to tweak your email marketing messages to appeal to different segments of your audience and customer base.

Don’t Limit Your Email to Just Text

Social media’s rise is also a boon for email marketing. No longer do you have to send just a plain text email. You can add in photos, videos, and even audio, which can increase the open rates and click-through rates of your email marketing campaign. This is also an opportunity to work with exclusive content with a very captive audience; one that wants to not only receive your message but to share it.

You can read this full article at Click Z