By Neil Glassman on August 23, 2010 10:50 AM

Sam Cece: 5 Objectives Driving Integration of Email and Social Media

head_cece Sam Cece is Chairman and CEO of online marketing solutions provider StrongMail. Follow his blog, School of Hard Knocks.

In StrongMail’s 2010 Email Marketing Survey, we asked a number of questions to determine how businesses were leveraging emerging communication channels to engage customers, and, more importantly, accomplish core business objectives. The findings of the report were particularly interesting when looking at email and social media. The survey revealed email was being used enhance the value of the social web for consumers and for the overall effectiveness of brands’ marketing programs. The survey identified five business objectives driving the integration of email and social media. Let’s take a look at each objective, the value to the business and some examples of how brands are executing towards these goals today.

Objective #1: Use email to promote presence on Twitter, Facebook and other social channels.

Email marketers were the first to understand that a “Like” on Facebook or a “Follow” on Twitter is simply another way for a customer to raise their hand and give a brand permission to communicate with them. Email marketers have been struggling for years with shrinking email lists and decreasing open rates as subscribers “tune out” much of the clutter within the inbox. Sophisticated email marketers have looked to email as a way to seed participation in social channels, running programs that drive Likes to Facebook or Follows on Twitter. The result is extended reach for the brand and increased engagement around marketing programs. Consider that the EEC recently reported that 66% of a marketer’s email file does not even open the email they receive. If just a small percentage of that unengaged base can be activated on the social web, it could drive a lot of value for the brand.

Brands are creating email communications that provide seamless integration to social networks like Facebook, enabling one-click Likes from an email to Facebook. More importantly, email marketers are creating best practices when moving customers from one communication channel to another. Brands are creating unique content, offers and personalities for each channel of engagement. The unique content available on Facebook, for example, serves as a motivator to engage in brand communications within the Facebook community even though the customer has been an email subscriber for years. The bottom line is that email marketers understand the huge engagement gap that has developed within email subscription files and are looking to close it by delivering permission marketing over social media.

Objective #2: Enable recipients to share email content with their social networks

It is commonly understood that peer groups tend to attract similar people. Look at the company you keep within your social circles. It is likely that the demographic details, interests and life stages are similar. This means that email marketers delivering personally relevant email to consumers can fairly safely assume that the content they deliver would be of value to each consumer’s peer network.

The critical point here is that the content must be relevant. Each time a consumer shares an offer or message from a brand, they spend some of their very precious “social capital.” Social capital is the currency of influence on the social web. When a member of a community expends social capital to share something interesting, valuable or fun with their social network, they earn social capitol and their level of influence within their network grows. Each time a consumer expends social capital to share something irrelevant or unappreciated by their networks they lose social capitol along with influence.

This means that email marketers who have invested heavily in database integration, personalization, event-triggered communication and preference centers have the ability to truly drive sharing of email content across the social web. Those brands still sending more generic communications will miss out on this trend and a big opportunity presented by the social web.

Objective #3: Use email to launch a referral/viral marketing campaign in social media

Many brands have fundamentally misunderstood the opportunity presented by the social web. Early adopters of social media flocked to Facebook and Twitter to develop “new” groups of brand Fans and Followers. The brand itself sought to develop a voice in social media and speak directly to their customers within social communities. These brands misunderstood the fundamental premise of social channels, allowing groups of interconnected people to interact with, share and communicate with each other free of influence from third parties (corporations, governments, schools, fraternities, etc.)

Don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting that there is not a significant business opportunity within social channels, quite the opposite, but in order to take advantage of the opportunity, brands must empower their BEST CUSTOMERS to advocate on their behalf, rather than attempting to leverage traditional direct marketing principles in these new, yet-to-be-defined channels. Smart email marketers understand that they have control of the best possible asset in referral marketing – the email subscription list. This list, combined with social insight data and things like purchase history enable email marketers to specifically target their best customers and identify which of these are most active on the social web.

Once the brand has segmented these Influencers, they leverage email to offer incentives and rewards for online referrals and advocacy. Email enables targeting that is difficult or impossible in other social channels. The objective is to get your best customers advocating on the brand’s behalf and reward them for this advocacy. Technology like StrongMail’s Influencer enables marketers to track referral from an email, through Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, all the way to purchase. This gives the brand the opportunity to:

Identify influencers over time.
Treat newly acquired customers (via referrals) as VIPs
Create scale and management of word-of-mouth marketing by increasing incentives and rewards or throttling up or down email targeting of influencers.
Increase new referral acquisition by 10% – 20% over traditional referral marketing.

Objective #4: Integrate user-generated content/reviews into email marketing campaigns

We were surprised to see this number so low. The integration of ratings and reviews into email marketing is not a new concept. Retailers have been doing it for quite a while now and are seeing some great results. In addition, integrations between email marketing technologies and rating/review systems have become commonplace. That said, according to Forrester Research, 77% of consumers use user-generated reviews or forums to make purchasing decisions. By integrating this information into an email promotion, brands make the path from review to sale quick and easy. This is a powerful example of how to leverage the conversations that are already happening about a brand’s products on the social web to generate more revenue within email marketing programs.

Objective #5: Leverage agency services to build an integrated social media program

This last business objective is extremely important as it indicates that brands lack the internal expertise required to build a truly integrated social media strategy. Social media is making the brand conversation more difficult to manage and it takes experience to avoid the pitfalls common when building social programs. Companies will leverage agency services to coordinate loyalty, database, web, email and other technologies/programs to deliver on the vision of social CRM.

Social CRM brings new elements into CRM, adding conversations and relationships between consumers to data and information already stored in a business’ CRM application. These conversations and relationships take place not just from company to consumer but also from consumer to consumer. Companies serious about the integration of email and social media understand that the effort extends beyond these two channels and are investing accordingly.