Email + Social Media Making Waves

The combination of email marketing and social media is gaining momentum as their revenue multiplying synergy becomes more widely recognized.

In a post entitled “The Magical Email-Social Combo,” Robin Neifield describes how marketers can use email marketing and personalized messaging to reach an audience that has shown positive interest in your brand on social media sites.

Neifield’s method of combining social media and email marketing is the approach most marketers take-using email and social media to support one another as communications channels, leveraging your messaging across each channel.

Similarly, in “Email + Social Media Marketing = Big Impact,” the Constant Contact Quickstarter blog informs us that “you can’t really talk about social media marketing without highlighting the importance of email marketing. The two have got some stuff in common, and work best when used together.”

The rising tide of social media coupled with email also can be seen in the prominent manner in which high-volume email service providers are promoting the combo. Blue Hornet, for example, describes its SocialLoop service as an “integrated email marketing and social media solution that gives your subscribers the power to spread your message to their social networks, extending your brand reach across multiple channels.”

eWayDirect takes email marketing and social media even further, using social media and website activities to trigger immediate personalized emails in what it calls “chatter marketing.” This method yields the impressive conversion results that triggered email has been shown to deliver.

As Epsilon’s “Q4 2011 Email Trend and Benchmarks” survey reported, triggered email, “often sent in real-time with greater relevance,” produced open rates that were 96% higher than “business-as-usual” emails, and click rates that were 125% higher.

To complement email marketing efforts, Epsilon recommends that marketers “establish a fully integrated strategy that incorporates other critical channels to reach consumers such as social, mobile and online.”

Personalization enhances the effectiveness of email campaigns and is an integral part of the most successful social media and email marketing efforts. As Epsilon advises, “Leveraging dynamic content and personalization will further increase response rates while the use of a series of messages-rather than a one off message-will solidify the customer experience and strengthen engagement.”

In Bronto’s email approach, customer profile and behavioral data is used to “personalize messages for higher impact and more revenue.” Bronto also says it can enable you to “easily create advanced segments based on profile data and email behavior (opens, clicks, conversions).”

In all email campaigns, a clean email list is key to achieving optimal results, and, if you want to build up your list or improve personalization, consider list enhancement services.

The effort put into data quality and integrated social and email marketing will pay off. As Epsilon relates, “By relying on triggers, data and multichannel integration, marketers can surpass industry standards and outperform their competition.”