STRATEGY GUIDE

Combining the power of email and social

Strategy guide Combining the power of email and social | 2

Contents

In this strategy guide, we’ve put together

5 tips for harnessing the combined power of

email and social.

Key takeaways:

Discover tactics to unite marketing activity on email and social

Learn how automation can save you time and help you make the most of customer data

Find out how connecting the channels can help you execute multichannel, customer-driven marketing

Email and social: friends or foes? 3

Email and social: how can they work in harmony? 4

Tip #1 Increase your social exposure through email 5

Tip #2 Convert your social followers into email subscribers 6

Tip #3 Identifying and utilizing social influencers 7

Tip #4 Automate your marketing to achieve personalized, 8 relevant communications

Tip #5 Tailor the content to the channel 10

Don’t just take our word for it 11

Email and social? Have you decided your tactics? 12

Tweet this!Reading @dotmailer’s new

strategy guide “Combining the

power of email and social”

Strategy guide Combining the power of email and social | 3

The size and scale of social media is undeniable. In September 2015, Twitter’s monthly users hit 320 million with Facebook’s at a massive 1.5 billion. But as impressive as these figures are, they’re nothing to the number of email accounts held around the world. Indeed, a recent study by the Radicati Group estimate that this will climb to 4.9 billion by the end of 2017.

So the real question is: how can social media tools work with email to produce the best results for your campaigns?

Email vs social?

Email marketing and social media are perceived to compete with one another. The ability to build and maintain customer relationships on such a current, customer-controlled medium has rocketed social media to the forefront of marketing departments’ strategies.

Social media was even seen as heralding the demise of email. Despite the gloomy forecast, email is, in fact, going from strength to strength.

With the constant introduction of new and flexible features, allowing brands to give their customers the best possible customer journey, email provides a low-cost medium that offers high ROI and extraordinary measurability.

Email and social: friends or foes?

“Gone are the days when the marketer

decides the channel. Today’s consumer

picks the channel and you have to be

where they are to reach them.”

Skip Fidura, Client Services Director, dotmailer

Strategy guide Combining the power of email and social | 4

Email or social?

Is it a case of either or? Might there be value in integrating the two and focusing on a multichannel, customer-driven approach?

Many marketers see the value of such an approach. Evidence is suggesting they’re adapting their budgets accordingly, using the channels that best suit their aims and achieve the best possible results. An article by SocialTimes highlighted that, ‘In 2015, 60.7% of marketers said they were increasing their email budgets’ and ‘50% of marketers plan to invest more in social.’

Email and social?

Smart marketers know that email and social can work in tandem, allowing them to communicate with customers across multiple channels. They don’t have to choose one or the other.

So have you combined the two in the smartest possible way yet? If not, don’t worry.

We’ve put together 5 top tips for harnessing the combined power of email and social, to support your campaigns in the most effective way possible.

“In 2015, 60.7% of marketers said they

were increasing their email budgets

and 50% of marketers plan to invest

more in social.”

SocialTimes, July 2015

1.5 billion monthly users, source: Facebook, September 2015

320 million monthly users, source: Twitter, September 2015

380 million monthly users, source: LinkedIn October 2015

Email and social: how can they work in harmony?

Strategy guide Combining the power of email and social | 5

The path to improved results

It’s easier than you think getting people to promote your product for you.

By adding links to your social profiles within your email campaigns, you can make it easy for your recipients to follow, like or connect with you via social media, absolutely free of charge.

If the recipients of your email choose to add your brand to their social networks, then that opens two channels through which to promote the desired content.

For example, if a user doesn’t take action immediately on an email, your social post might remind them to take up your offer at a later stage.

While social links are an easy and quick tool to implement, simply placing an icon on an email doesn’t necessarily explain to the user the desired action you’d like them to take.

The value of combining email and social has been seen by many companies.

One example is a Sony Vaio email campaign. By including Pin It buttons, Sony received 3,000 click-throughs. By using the power of social sharing, Sony received 172% email revenue more than expected, (source: SocialTimes).

Many companies use their social channels to share offers, deals or promotions. However, there’s room to be far more creative. A great example is from Bed, Bath & Beyond with a well incentivized email, solely developed as a means to promote the following of their social channels.

By offering incentives associated with each different channel in social media, Bed, Bath & Beyond provided a clear benefit to joining the recipients preferred social channel.

TIP #1 Increase your social exposure through email

You can solve this by adding a simple message above the call to action like these examples from CrunchBase, and ‘Not on the High Street’.

Another company that does this to great effect is ASOS. By including buttons to all the social networks, customers can choose to interact with their brand in a preferred space.

Strategy guide Combining the power of email and social | 6

Looking to integrate your followers on social media into your email marketing strategy?

With just a few clicks, users can share their contact information with you, providing you with a great ‘follow-up’ opportunity.

Here are three reasons why we think Twitter lead generation cards could prove a useful channel for email marketers:

• The audience is already engaged

Twitter lead generation cards allow marketers to put themselves in front of their followers in a potentially more engaging way – using images.

• Twitter becomes a data capture and list building

touchpoint When a Twitter user clicks on a lead generation card’s call to action, marketers will be supplied with their email address and their Twitter handle.

• Personal, accurate contact details Another aspect we like about lead generation cards is that the probability of the data being accurate is high. Twitter automatically populates the lead generation card with the email a customer has linked to their Twitter account, this is typically a personal email.

Another key feature of Twitter lead generation cards, is the ability to have your new leads instantly updated into your CRM system: you don’t have to export to a CSV spreadsheet beforehand anymore.

TIP #2 Convert your social followers into email subscribers

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Strategy guide Combining the power of email and social | 7

Social influencers are fast becoming a valuable way for businesses to reach their objectives.

It can have several positive impacts for your brand when you engage with social influencers. These include:

• Increase in brand awareness• Increase in page rank on search engines• Increase in online reputation• Creation of brand advocates

Social influencers can often commit to sharing content to their followers as a means to grow their audience or can often benefit through incentives, whether it be financially, via free trials or products.

How do you decide who the right social influencer is for your content?

In our opinion, there are three key points to address when looking into social media influencers. These are:

• Quality – The type of engagement with your content, of benefit.

• Relevance – The social media influencer should be relevant to the topic being presented.

• Reach – This doesn’t always mean the size of the following. It can also refer to the quality.

For certain content you may wish to look at social influencers with a more focused following. Keep in mind, though, that someone who has influence in one area might not have the same level in another.

In order to find the right person for your content, there are several services specifically designed to help you. For example, Kred, Klout, Twellow, are all effective tools, especially when used alongside a search engine.

Marco Hansell, CEO of Speakr, demonstrated the necessity to not solely rely on the number of followers by advising to focus ‘on engagement rates rather than follower count’ and ‘making sure a person’s followers really care about the content coming from that individual’s feed.’

By using the top ranking options on a search engine, and comparing page owner to Klout, it allows you to get the most out of these services, and more importantly, the right person for your brand and your content.

TIP #3 Identifying and utilizing social influencers

“5–10% of [social media users] are

responsible for 60–80% of influence.”

Dmitri Williams, Associate Professor at the University of Southern California

Strategy guide Combining the power of email and social | 8

‘Research indicates that good segmentation drives 50% more response than other aspects such as creative, timing, offer and so on,’ (source: DMA National Client Email Report 2014).

This demonstrates that the key to a successful multichannel marketing strategy is based on the premise that you send relevant content to your contacts.

Through automating your marketing you are able to schedule, track and use the insight from communications to target leads and customers.

Harnessing the power of the data that you hold on customers is crucial to effective marketing.

By using transactional, demographic and behavioral data you hold in your CRM, you can segment your customers into highly targeted, responsive groups. Alongside personalized emails, triggered campaigns and maintaining regular communication, your automated email campaigns stand the best possible chance of success.

TIP #4 Automate your marketing

Strategy guide Combining the power of email and social | 9

One brand that offers highly personalized emails, based around the data they hold from previous transactions, or in this case views, is Netflix. On signing up, Netflix send ‘welcome’ emails, followed by suggestions of available movies. However, if it’s not the first time that you’ve been a member, you receive a more personal email in which Netflix use data to determine that you were previously a member and the type of movie you watch. This slight change gives the user a sense of reassurance.

Taking this further, on navigating through the content, Netflix has the ability to provide a tailored email, with the subject line ‘we think you might like….’ This is a great example of putting data to work.

According to CMO.com, personalized emails deliver six times higher transaction rates, and in-house marketers who personalize their web experiences see on average a 19% uplift in sales.

However, although not to the same extent as in email, the ability to target specific groups of people also exists in social media channels. Targeting specific audiences, based on interests, member group, age, among others, allows marketers to offer content that is relevant to individuals through various channels, simultaneously and easily. One example of social targeting is on LinkedIn and the ability to use Sponsored Updates as a means to target a specific group or category of individual, as seen below:

Strategy guide Combining the power of email and social | 10

It’s always important to remember who you’re targeting through a piece of content. However in the same way, it is important to tailor the content you’re promoting to the channel you’re using to promote it.

In many ways, email and social are natural bedfellows but in other ways they’re far from it. Email is personal and recognized as a channel through which transactions happen, whereas social is semi-open and a channel of chat/sharing rather than buying decisions and actions.

The ability to tailor content is an important part of email marketing. Personalization within email campaigns has seen dotmailer’s clients benefit from creating tailored campaigns around customer data. Deborah Lippmann is a great example of this, with ‘revenue generated by email in November 2014 five times than the same month in 2013.’

Derek Halpern, founder of Social Triggers and an influential blogger, demonstrated the necessity to tailor your content to the channel in a test he carried out. By sending a link to a piece of content through Twitter, it generated 50 clicks.

However, by sending the same link through email, he generated over 1,200 clicks or 24 times that of Twitter. Email is not to be underestimated.

More and more marketers are now looking to tools such as Sprout Social and Hootsuite as a means to post on all their social media channels, whether it be Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or FourSquare.

These allow you to simultaneously post across a variety of different social media platforms. As well as saving time, these tools also allow accurate ROI measurement.

However, using these social sharing tools and the use of such generic content will limit the impact of the content.

Through tailoring the content to suit the nature of the social channel, and the audience you are promoting to, there’s the ability to increase engagement and understanding in what is being posted.

TIP #5 Tailor the content to the channel

A brand that distinguishes well between content pushed through social media and email is Notonthehighstreet.com. Here you can see that the content in the brand’s tweets is easily digestible, with a simple call-to-action and an image that attracts attention.

Notonthehighstreet.com’s email campaign is targeted at a specific event, in this case Father’s Day, with relevant information, product details, and a call-to-action to shop. But there’s also the ability to visit other areas, browse and engage with the brand – so as not to limit the email’s appeal.

Strategy guide Combining the power of email and social | 11

There are many examples of companies seeing huge amounts of ROI from integrating their social strategies and email campaigns. One example is ODEON Cinemas: as a dotmailer client, they are perfectly placed to benefit from integrating their email marketing campaign with social media.

ODEON executed a very successful marketing initiative that blends email and social media with transactional data held in dotmailer, to tailor communications with key target groups. The campaign was so successful that they were shortlisted for a DMA Award in 2014.

The project’s strategy was based on utilizing ODEON Cinemas’ customer data to create ‘lookalike’ segments and target these groups with personalized content.

“The ROI was excellent,” says Aislinn McGurk, Social Media Executive. “For a total outlay of £3,000 we generated over £13,000 of ticket sales, which we were able to track directly to the campaign.”

Don’t just take our word for it

“The ROI was excellent... the whole

exercise shows the value added

by the dotmailer data”

Aislinn McGurk, Social Media Executive, ODEON Cinemas

Strategy guide Combining the power of email and social | 12

In retrospect, it’s clear that social media and email marketing certainly both pack a punch on their own. But by integrating the two, you’ll be capable of fully exploiting the benefits of both channels and create a powerful synchronicity that will yield remarkable ROI.

Integrate email and social today and promote your content in the most effective way possible.

With the ever-growing influence that social media has on brands, and the continuing ROI and revenue that email develops, the ability to integrate the two is of great value to brands.

Companies are looking to new techniques to develop interest in content, develop following on social channels and increase the number of subscribers within their database. Email and social working together can help reach all these goals.

Through using the variety of channels available, with email as the glue to hold them together, you stand the best chance of success.

Email and social? Have you decided your tactics?

Discover how dotmailer can help transform your business.

Visit dotmailer.com or call +44 845 337 9170

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