Integration Of Email & Social Tools Targeting Content Sharing From Inbox
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As social media has emerged as a staple in marketer’s toolkits, many Email Service Providers (ESPs) are now integrating social capabilities into their applications. The new capabilities are aimed at capitalizing on the growing reach and extended sharing tools within social media channels, and may give marketers the opportunity to extend their email campaign content to other audiences on the social sphere.
The biggest splash around the integration of email and social media came last month when Google unveiled its new Google Buzz, which is built into Gmail. Buzz is designed to enable users to follow the people they email and chat with the most. The solution is designed to enable a sharing experience that integrates photos, videos and links, which can be easy to share publicly or privately.
Social networks are the fastest-growing engagement point between brands and their customers, according to Forrester Research. The research firm predicts that social media marketing will grow faster than any other form of interactive marketing. In its 2009 U.S. Interactive Marketing Forecast Report, Forrester estimated social media marketing will grow at a compound annual rate of 34%, reaching $3.1 billion by 2014.
Other research indicates that email and social media top the list of marketing tactics where spending will increase in 2010. Nearly nine in 10 plan to increase or maintain their marketing budgets, and one-half expect their customers to be spending more in the coming year, according to the “2010 Marketing Trends Survey” from StrongMail.
“Social sharing provides an additional medium to communicate with customers and prospects alike,” said Marty Wesley, VP of Products, Bronto Software . “Marketers can gain access to the social networks of their contacts with very little effort, giving marketers greater efficiencies for their marketing efforts. It also provides a first step in the process of organically creating a presence in social networks without having to create new content or collateral.”
Bronto's Share Within Your Network functionality is designed to allow marketers to extend their reach by integrating trackable social marketing links into their email marketing campaigns using its WSIWYG editor. Currently Facebook, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn and Myspace are included in the integration.
Wesley said the application can track and report on any links in the email message, in addition to message bounces and messages shared or forwarded to friends. This detailed activity can then be used to segment and target future messages.
Responsys rolled out the new Interact Campaign for Social Networks last week. The campaign management solution is designed to enable marketers to create, schedule, and track campaigns sent to their social networks on either Facebook or Twitter. In addition to delivering campaigns to a brand’s fans or followers, the solution enables the content to be further spread by sharing, commenting or retweeting. All clicks and downstream conversions or purchases are automatically tracked for reporting, attribution, and analysis within the Responsys platform.
The “share rate” or “pass-along rate” of the email campaign can also be automatically tracked when content is shared to a social network. The solution is designed to target “social promotors,” – recipients who share content with their personal network — so that they can be treated as a special segment for follow-on campaigns or reporting purposes.
John Berkley, VP Product Marketing, Responsys, said tracking this activity can ultimately lead to additional revenue opportunities. “As some consumers are more engaged in social networks than they are in email, posting promotions to social networks opens up an additional direct-response marketing channel,” he said. “This can be especially true when a consumer is being passed information about a brand’s promotion from an ’influencer’ – or a person that they trust.”
ExactTarget's Social Forward is designed to streamline the sharing of email marketing messaging for users to engage with and share email marketing messages. The ExactTarget solution is comprised of three components. An integration with ShareThis is aimed at enabling recipients to share content to over 20 online networks and communities, while providing the metrics marketers need to create a strategy around social content. The Direct to Social capability is designed to enable subscribers to share content directly to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, and other on-line communities. The Forward to a Friend feature is designed to allow subscribers to share a message directly with their friends via email. The Forward to a Friend feature enables subscribers to include a personal note about the message and send it on to their friends via email. Marketers are able to track how many times their message was forwarded and how many new subscribers they’ve gained as a result.
“By giving subscribers control over messages, marketers gain access to vast new audiences,” Rob Wiley, Product Marketing Manager, ExactTarget. “Tracking metrics provide the data needed to improve the results of social networking strategies, as well as prove the effectiveness of existing campaigns.”
In a further example of the integration of social and email tools, ExactTarget acquired CoTweet in early March, to tie together all forms of interactive communication — email, mobile, social, sites. San Francisco-based CoTweet allows businesses to manage multiple Twitter accounts and track social media conversations.
Leveraging the fast-growing Twitter platform, YesMail recently unveiled a new solution designed to help marketers work ahead by drafting and scheduling tweets in advance while aligning them with multi-message campaigns. For Yesmail Enterprise clients, the Twitter Campaign Management Feature aims to capitalize on the social networks’ popularity. Twitter finished 2009 with nearly 20 million visitors to its Web site, up from just 2 million visitors in 2008, according to comScore.
Taking a Page from the BtoC Playbook
Responsys client Diapers.com said its customers are interacting with the online retailer over a number of different channels, increasing the important of social networking to its business model. “For us, social marketing, while exciting, has been an extremely ad-hoc and manual process,” said Kevin Slagle, Associate Marketing Director at Diapers.com. “We are now able to manage our social presence in a manner that is integrated with our other marketing channels, campaigns, and activities.”
In 2009 pizza franchise Papa John’s used ExactTarget’s Social Forward feature in its NCAA men’s basketball tournament-themed campaign. In the first three days of the campaign, Papa John’s added more than 45,000 fans on Facebook, bringing the total number to more than 270,000, according to ExactTarget.