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This guide, produced in conjunction with email marketing provider StrongView, contains the following: -Real life examples of how email marketing done right helps businesses -Practical tips for marrying social data and email marketing to establish authentic connections with subscribers -Ways social data can be used to deliver direct value to email marketing campaigns
Citation preview
Using Social Data to Win at Email Marketing
© 2013 GIGYA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. | 888-660-1469 | www.gigya.com | @gigya | blog.gigya.com
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First comes the struggle to avoid being flagged as spam.
Shortly after, the fight to stand out among armies of other
emails screaming for attention ensues: “Wedding
announcement!” “Admissions letter!” “Credit card statement!”
And just when you think the clouds of doom have lifted, the
challenge of getting that user to click through your subject line
and open that email rears its daunting, leering head.
Email marketing today exists in
an age of many battles.
Using Social Data to Win at Email Marketing
© 2013 GIGYA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. | 888-660-1469 | www.gigya.com | @gigya | blog.gigya.com
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To attract more eyeballs to your email content, your business needs to craft the right messages for the right audiences. This means delivering
email content that’s so relevant to your subscribers’ backgrounds, interests, and lifestyles that
they’re inclined to single it out among the heaps of other messages and actually read it.
So how do businesses attract more readers and consistently deliver email content that’s
valuable and immediately opened? This guide breaks down the different ways that email
marketing done right helps businesses and provides practical tips for marrying social data and
email marketing to establish personal, lasting connections with audiences and encourage
desired user behaviors.
61% of people state that “not being interested in an email” was the most common reason for not opening an email, followed by “getting too many emails” (45%). Source: Chadwick Martin Bailey, 2012
Using Social Data to Win at Email Marketing
© 2013 GIGYA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. | 888-660-1469 | www.gigya.com | @gigya | blog.gigya.com
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Better Emails Mean Giving Users a VIP Experience
An effective email marketing strategy centers around three key characteristics—value, intentionality, and
personalization.
VALUE means keeping users’
best interests in mind and
engaging in a mutually beneficial
interaction with them. Email
messages that fail to deliver
value to their recipients are
almost undoubtedly going to end
up in the Trash folder. Knowing
what content will keep your
emails out of the Trash folder for
each subscriber is possible
through analyzing social data.
We’ll discuss this in more detail
later.
INTENTIONAL ITY refers to a
mindset of sending purposeful,
goal-centric emails rather than
bombarding users with a ton of
content that fails to deliver value
and increase engagement. Keep
in mind that your users are
inundated with emails already on
a daily basis. To avoid being a
part of the email clutter, make
sure to only send them emails
with a clearly defined intent
instead of just emailing them for
the sake of being in touch.
PERSONALIZ ATION means
targeting your email efforts to
your audience’s specific interests,
backgrounds, habits, and needs.
The first step to email
personalization is segmenting
your reader base according to
specific actions they’ve taken or
interests that they’ve listed on
their profiles. By adding a layer
of customization to your email
campaigns, you greatly increase
the likelihood of reaching the
right users with the most
relevant messages.
Email Marketing in its Many Forms
Email marketing represents just one part of an entire digital marketing strategy, but crafting the right
message is crucial to achieving your business goals. Below are some examples of commonly deployed email
campaigns and their typical use cases:
Welcome or Confirmation Messages are that first emails that new customers receive upon registering for
an account. These emails can contain that user’s login credentials (if applicable), an initial discount or offer,
and tips for using the site to encourage lasting brand engagement.
Newsletters or Digests communicate information that your users are interested in on a regular basis.
These email blasts can contain content developed in-house, thought leadership from outside sources, or a
combination of both. The overarching intent is to develop a consistent stream of direct communication with
audiences.
Company or Product Announcements keep users updated as your business grows. By informing users of
significant updates, your business promotes transparency and clear communication, which encourage user
trust and loyalty. Plus, you give them the added bonus of receiving exclusive content first in exchange for
subscribing.
Special Offers or Promotions give your subscribers access to exclusive deals. This incentivizes purchasing,
builds loyalty, and drives social sharing. Randomized email offers can build excitement and anticipation
among readers while also encouraging impulse purchases.
Using Social Data to Win at Email Marketing
© 2013 GIGYA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. | 888-660-1469 | www.gigya.com | @gigya | blog.gigya.com
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How Does Social Data Tie In?
By now, you might be wondering where social data falls in the discussion of email marketing. To
sum it up, social data is the fuel for impactful email marketing. Email marketing without social
data is simply mass emailing, which hardly differs from spam.
The core of using social data for email
marketing is audience segmentation. By nature,
audiences are fragmented, or unique in their
backgrounds, interests, and friend networks.
Audience segmentation means indexing users’
data to segment them into groups so that you
can target each group with a uniquely tailored
email subject line and message. Segmentation
can be done by analyzing profile information,
behavioral data, or a combination of both. How
you choose to segment your audience is entirely
up to your business’s unique goals.
To provide more context around email segmentation best practices, we’ve included some use
cases below.
“Email marketing
without social data is
simply mass emailing,
which hardly differs
from spam.”
Using Social Data to Win at Email Marketing
© 2013 GIGYA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. | 888-660-1469 | www.gigya.com | @gigya | blog.gigya.com
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Dropbox Encourages Users to Complete the Setup Process
When users sign up for an account but fail to complete the product installation process,
Dropbox sends the above email about 20 minutes after the initial registration. This type of
communication is called a triggered email because it is sent after certain triggers, or specified
actions, occur. In this case, the trigger was the user’s failure to finish installing the product.
Notice that Dropbox’s email is personalized, brief, upbeat, and contains an obvious call to
action. It greets the user with his or her first name, carries a tone of excitement, and relays
Dropbox’s value proposition in a couple of sentences.
Using Social Data to Win at Email Marketing
© 2013 GIGYA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. | 888-660-1469 | www.gigya.com | @gigya | blog.gigya.com
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NFL.com Celebrates Users’ Birthdays with Personalized Gear and Discounts
NFL.com sends a birthday email to its users with an image of a personalized jersey and a 15%
discount enclosed. By reaching out to its customers with a birthday greeting, NFL.com adds a
personal touch to its email marketing efforts and encourages users to buy more merchandise.
The main purpose of this message—to encourage purchases over NFL.com’s e-commerce site—
is supported by a clear call to action and customized product image.
Using Social Data to Win at Email Marketing
© 2013 GIGYA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. | 888-660-1469 | www.gigya.com | @gigya | blog.gigya.com
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LinkedIn Suggests Individually-Tailored Career Opportunities
By default, LinkedIn sends weekly curated emails containing job opportunities based on that
user’s profile. For example, the above email is specifically tailored for a user located in the San
Francisco Bay Area with “Content Marketing Manager” as her primary job title.
LinkedIn’s Jobs email campaign contains multiple clear calls to action organized in a scannable,
succinct format. The obvious goal of these emails is to encourage more usage of their website’s
Jobs section while delivering value to the user by offering relevant career opportunities in an
easily digestible manner.
Using Social Data to Win at Email Marketing
© 2013 GIGYA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. | 888-660-1469 | www.gigya.com | @gigya | blog.gigya.com
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Six Steps for Optimizing Email Campaigns with Social Data
Now that we’ve explored several examples of social data being used to send highly targeted
emails, it’s crucial to understand, on a practical level, how this integration works. To help you
better use social data to improve your email marketing campaigns, we’ve summed up the
process in six steps.
1. Evaluate your goals to determine what social data you need
Businesses need to align their social data requests to their goals. For instance, an e-commerce
company that wants to decrease shopping cart abandonment rates might send users who
abandon their shopping cart for more than 12 hours a triggered email reminder. This requires
businesses to have data on shopping cart abandonment instances and their corresponding
users’ account data and email addresses.
When requesting users’ data, it’s important to find a medium ground between gathering the
data your business needs and not asking for so much that it feels intrusive. Respect is key here:
your business should treat data collection as a mutual exchange. As users share their
information with you, your duty is to safeguard it and use it to provide value for them.
2. Find or build a database to store, sync, and update data securely and
automatically
Once you’ve determined which user information your business can benefit most from, you’ll
need a database that can properly store and manage this data. Specifically, you’ll want a
database with the following characteristics:
Dynamic-schema - This refers to a database that can organize and index varied data
types such as profile photos, friend lists, and status updates. While traditional databases
are organized in a grid format and can only handle static data, a dynamic-schema
“Your business should treat data collection as a mutual exchange.”
Using Social Data to Win at Email Marketing
© 2013 GIGYA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. | 888-660-1469 | www.gigya.com | @gigya | blog.gigya.com
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database manages information in such a way that marketers can query and easily find
the data they need.
Centralized - Storing data in a single, unified location provides easy access to data from
different web properties and collection points so your business can more efficiently scale
your marketing efforts and reach the right users at the right time.
In the cloud - Cloud storage for social data is crucial, as traditional IT systems are not
equipped to handle the massive, dynamic nature of social data. Not only that, but storing
data in the cloud also cuts IT costs and allows for quicker access and collaboration.
Automatic, real-time updating - As users continue to interact with their social
networks, they essentially send new data points that businesses should collect and
utilize. Using a database that automatically syncs with social network updates is
particularly important in order to remain relevant to your users, who are constantly
updating their social profiles.
3. Create audience segments based on your email marketing goals
Segmenting your audience is the first step when creating a tailored email campaign, as it
essentially lets you group consumers according to specific criteria, such as interests, site
actions, and backgrounds. By dividing your audience into groups, you set the stage to begin
sending tailored emails that your readers will actually care about.
To help you get going on audience segmentation, below are some sample use cases:
A news and media publisher can segment its audience by the types of articles they read
the most regularly. By dividing its readers by interests and reading history, this publisher
can send customized daily or weekly email digests to readers containing content that
interests them.
A retailer with both an e-commerce presence and physical storefronts can segment
its customers by location and send emails announcing local store sales to the relevant
users to encourage more frequent shopping.
A subscription service can segment its customers according to their subscription
activation date and send personalized email reminders to customers a few weeks before
their account expires prompting them to renew.
The next page outlines suggestions for audience segmentation to help you get started.
Using Social Data to Win at Email Marketing
© 2013 GIGYA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. | 888-660-1469 | www.gigya.com | @gigya | blog.gigya.com
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4. Import segmentation and audience data into your email marketing platform
After segmenting your audience according to your email marketing goals, you’ll need to pass
this data onto your email marketing provider before you can actually put it into action. In order
to take full charge of your marketing strategy, you should invest in a database that allows you
to segment and export user data without the help of IT.
5. Craft tailored emails for each of your audience segments
Now that you’ve segmented and imported your
data to your email marketing provider, you’re ready
to start creating your tailored email campaigns.
When crafting emails for marketing, consider
personalizing each message to your specific
audience segment to achieve greater relevancy
with your users.
With email marketing, trial and error is a necessary
first step when fine-tuning your email campaigns.
To find which messages resonate the most with
your audiences, consider writing multiple
messages with the same call-to-action and A/B
testing your emails. To streamline the email
customization process, you’ll want to use an email
client that makes it easy to generate new content
for each of your subscribers.
Factors to Consider When
Working with Social Data in
Email Marketing
Is my database able to store high
volumes of data and sync them to my
email marketing client without IT
assistance?
Can my database automatically update
itself to consistently reflect accurate
data?
How can I best segment my audience
and personalize my email strategy to
my users’ social and behavioral
profiles?
Four Types of Actionable Social Data for Email Marketing
1. Website activity indicates a user’s behavior on a website, such as the time spent on each page
and what content is being shared on social networks.
2. Email interaction refers to actions taken within an email, including opening a message, clicking a
link, and unsubscribing.
3. Purchase history signifies a user’s past purchases, which can be a predictor for future spending.
4. Profile information includes any personal data that users have agreed to share with your web
properties, such as location, marital status, and friends.
Using Social Data to Win at Email Marketing
© 2013 GIGYA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. | 888-660-1469 | www.gigya.com | @gigya | blog.gigya.com
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6. Measure your email marketing results
To our earlier point, measuring your campaigns is key to optimizing for email marketing
success. By monitoring and measuring your email marketing efforts, you’ll discover which
messages click and which end up in your users’ Trash folders, making it easier for you to reach
your users with the most effective messaging.
Keep in mind that email performance measurement should be an ongoing process. In other
words, your successful email campaigns may not resonate quite the same way with your
audiences a few months down the line, and their social data may change. The only way to truly
optimize for email campaign performance is to watch your results regularly and continue
adjusting your strategy based on results and the new data you acquire.
We’ve arrived at the end of our battle
Now that you have a more comprehensive understanding of just how social data impacts email
marketing to facilitate more personalized, targeted emails, you’re ready to begin putting your
learnings into practice.
To learn more about collecting, managing, and using social data in your marketing campaigns,
check out The Complete Guide to Social Infrastructure.
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Using Social Data to Win at Email Marketing
© 2013 GIGYA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. | 888-660-1469 | www.gigya.com | @gigya | blog.gigya.com
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ABOUT GIGYA
Gigya's Customer Identity Management Platform helps more than 700 of the world’s
leading businesses such as Fox, Forbes, and Verizon build better customer
relationships by turning unknown visitors into known, loyal and engaged customers.
ABOUT THE NEXUS PARTNER ECOSYSTEM
Gigya’s NEXUS Partner Ecosystem provides over 50 direct integrations with today’s
leading marketing and service applications to apply permission-based, first-party
identity data to your marketing campaigns. In doing so, you will be able to reach
customers on a deeper, more personal level and significantly improve your cross-
channel campaign performance.
To learn more, refer to our NEXUS Partners site.
Gigya at a Glance
Leading provider of customer identity management for businesses
700+ customers, including Fox, Forbes and Verizon
Technology reaches more than 1.5 billion unique users every month
Using Social Data to Win at Email Marketing
© 2013 GIGYA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. | 888-660-1469 | www.gigya.com | @gigya | blog.gigya.com
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ABOUT STRONGVIEW
StrongView is the cross-channel marketing software provider that gives
enterprise marketers a stronger view of how to acquire and engage
customers across email, mobile, social, display and web. Combining the
strongest technology and proven marketing know-how, StrongView
provides enterprise marketers unparalleled insight into how to deepen
customer relationships and maximize results. The platform is offered as
both SaaS and on-premise, allowing companies to deploy StrongView’s
technologies in the manner that best fits their needs.
Based in Redwood City, CA, and backed by leading venture capital
investors, StrongView has been helping global brands in retail, travel,
finance, entertainment and online services overcome the limitations of
other marketing platform providers for more than a decade.
For a stronger view of marketing go to www.StrongView.com, and follow us at
www.twitter.com/StrongView and www.facebook.com/StrongViewInc.