Linking E-mail Marketing and Social Media

Webology 101

Trucking industry marketers looking to get a handle on social media as a promotional tool have found an easy solution: Simply integrate the medium into existing e-mail marketing programs. Specifically, these early adopters say a little creative contact with current and potential customers on social networks such as Facebook, Myspace and Twitter can add new muscle to tried-and-true e-mail.

"The reality is that the marketplace is pulling us to the places people spend time online," said Tom Nightingale, vice president of communications and chief marketing officer at Con-way Inc., noting that the company regularly uses e-mail to drive both independent truckers and customers to Con-way's presences on the social networks. "We currently have five Facebook pages, two Twitter accounts and one YouTube channel for the company."

So far, Nightingale said, the promotional push has paid off handsomely: "Social networks are digital and create mountains of traceable data about how customers behave online. We can look at click-streams to see what messages and relationships we are creating on social networks are turning into sales or near-sales."

Information the company gathers from Twitter is particularly "invaluable," Nightingale said. "We see what other companies are doing and what issues are important to them and their audiences. We see what drivers are talking about and what customers need. We are notified of events and news and can keep up to speed with perspectives from other industries that impact ours," he said.

Besides cross-promotions with social media, there are new tools available to help carriers get even more mileage out of their e-mail list data. StrongMail's new Social Studio service, for example, enables fleets to match e-mail addresses in their databases with "top influences" - people who have a lot of active friends online - and then reach out to those influences with rewards, offers and word-of-mouth promotional programs.

A number of marketers already have used Social Studio to invite such influencers to alert their Facebook friends about discounts and promotions and then give rewards to those influencers who generate the most conversions in terms of referred sales or other desired actions.

"The real value of social-media marketing is to move beyond merely listening, to start driving actual revenue," Paul Bates, U.K. managing director at StrongMail, said on that company's website.

Indeed, these programs' ability to ferret out social activity on the Web by the simple input of an e-mail address can be so powerful, the result can sometimes be unsettling.

Flowtown, a niche service that focuses primarily on mining and manipulating evidence of social networking, invites all comers to its website to enter any e-mail address and instantly view all the Web activity associated with that e-mail.

I took the bait, and, not surprisingly, found a few revelations on my social-network activity with e-mail addresses I currently use for such purposes. But, in addition, Flowtown also unearthed a website community I joined - and forgot about - years ago with an old e-mail address I haven't used in years. The Web never forgets.

Granted, trucking marketers will need to balance the appearance of reaching out to socially active customers and becoming willing participants in privacy invasion, but it's clear that every public move made by a person on the Internet can be discovered, sliced, diced - and turned into a marketing opportunity.

In fact, some of the more sophisticated programs now offer marketers dashboards they can use to create, manage and monitor such integrated programs across all digital media, including e-mail, social, mobile and Web.

ExactTarget's Interactive Marketing Hub, for example, offers a CoTweet Social module that enables marketers to manage multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts, track conversations, schedule posts - while monitoring all the activity with analytics and reports.

Another module within the package, Sites, gives marketers the ability to create, design and deploy static, interactive or socially enabled landing pages to support specific marketing campaigns. And still other modules offer enhanced interactivity and monitoring via e-mail and mobile phones.

Similar programs with all-in-one solutions include Interact Campaign, from Responsys, and the aforementioned Social Studio from StrongMail, both long-established e-mail marketing companies.

For some, this fusion of e-mail marketing and social media seems inevitable. "View from the Social Inbox," a study released in 2010 by Merkle (www.merkleinc.com), for example, found that active social networkers are also likely to be avid e-mail users. All told, the study found 42% of social networkers check their e-mail four or more times a day, as compared to just 27% of those who don't socialize online.

As the fusion gels, here are some tactics you'll find marketers already using to combine the two, either by using pre-configured programs, or putting together applications of their own:

* Get the most from testimonials: Customer accolades look good on company websites - but even better on customer Facebook pages. By combining e-mail with social networks, a carrier can solicit testimonials from satisfied customers, then post those endorsements on Facebook, Twitter and the like.

* Embed social network testimonials in e-mails: Sometimes, spontaneous testimonials pop up on Facebook and Twitter without any prodding whatsoever. Such promotional gifts can be easily cut and pasted into the next marketing e-mail - along with a grateful nod to the author.

* Reach out to top influencers in new ways: With the ability to monitor social networking activity like never before, marketers are getting very creative about reaching out and partnering. Many of the e-mail/social media suites and services, for example, are allowing them to input an entire customer e-mail list and instantly identify e-mail addresses owned by people who have hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of friends on Facebook and similar social networks. Marketers then can reach out to these people via e-mail and partner with them on word-of-mouth promotions.

Many new programs also can track the referrals generated by these influencers and verify which of them ultimately are generating the most conversions in terms of sales or some other desired action. Subsequently, la cr�me de la cr�me can be rewarded most heavily and primed for a series of unfolding word-of-mouth promotions.

* Fish where the fish are: Running an e-mail database through some of these more sophisticated programs can also yield an interesting picture of where your customers - or potential partners - hangout. You may find, for example, that the greatest percentage of your customers and partners hang out on Twitter, rather than Facebook. Consequently, you'll be able to put your digital marketing dollars where they'll reach the greatest percentage of your customers.

Con-way Multimodal last year launched an application on Twitter called TweetLoad after concluding that Twitter could be a quick way to set up a two-way communications channel between the company and independent drivers. The service, which sends alerts to drivers about available loads every 15 minutes, has been a remarkable success.

"Drivers can secure a load by logging in to Con-way Multimodal's link board, or by calling the phone number given in each Tweet," Nightingale said.

"Con-way sees the value of social media as a direct connection to all of its audiences, especially drivers," Nightingale added. "Most drivers have a laptop or mobile computing device with them on the road. Participating in Web communities using social media offers the company a connection to drivers, and that is just not possible otherwise due to the nature of the job."

* Optimize your e-mail for social media: This is really the first step in any synthesis campaign and should be part of every e-mail marketing campaign, no questions asked. Such optimization is as easy as adding links in your e-mail to the key social networks, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. There's also a ShareThis button (http://sharethis.com/) you can add to your e-mail that instantly offers clickable access to dozens of social networking sites.

"Online social networking is much like networking offline," said Michael Schlotfeldt, vice president of marketing at Plaudit Design, a Web design and marketing firm that does work for the trucking industry. "It takes time, and the results are slow and often below the surface. In both, you have to carefully choose how to spend your time in order to build relationships and achieve your goals. What I like the most is the ability to talk personally with individuals or at least small groups. With many types of marketing you speak to such a large group it is often easy to lose the personal connections. For us, social networking is most effective when we participate in conversations instead of just broadcasting a message."

[Sidebar]

Every public move made by a person on the Internet can be discovered, sliced, diced and turned into a marketing opportunity.

[Author Affiliation]

Joe Dysart is an Internet speaker and business consultant based in Manhattan. Voice: (646) 233-4089. E-mail: joe@joedysart.com. Web: www.joedysart.com.