Social networking sites can offer rich, new sources of information for marketers, which gives indepth customer motivations and behaviourior data. The most effective way to use this information is for "Social e-mail" campaigning. Social email can help potential customer to take the crucial step in the buye rdecision making process that closes the loop between the customer and the shopping cart. E-mail campaigns which manage to be relevant to a brand's social engagement
with customers, are most likely to achieve this.
"Social e-mail" refers to the combined use of data gathered using social media, and e-mail list data, in order to accomplish key online marketing tasks: including;
Increasing e-mail campaign relevance
More effective campaign targeting
Enhancing of social media engagement
To drive online sales
By themselves, neither social marketing campaigns or e-mail campaigns are likely to provide as comprehensive a view of your subscribers as an effective social e-mail program will achieve. Effective
social e-mail is dependant upon an information exchange between your chosen social sites and
your e-mail marketing database.
Follow these three steps to get you there:
1. Maximise the potential of social sharing that is already taking place - Email campaigns which contain llinks such as, "share to social" or "share with your network," can provide great insights to help marketers identify the members of an e-mail subscriber list. These users are likely to be frequent sharers of your content.
2.Grow your list - Widgets on your social media pages can grow your list by asking users sign-up. This will help you identify social networks are best for your campaign obectives, by showing you the top sites with which your subscribers engage. This data should be used to deploy your triggered welcome campaigns, personalized uing an understanding of the new subscriber's preferred social networking site. You can also optimize your social media marketing activities based around social network popularity.
3. Identify which of your e-mail subscribers are most socially engaged with your brand. Understand the of social sites your new subscribers use in order to directly engage with it. You should now be ready to engage with and target you recipients. In this way, you will be conducting truly social e-mail campaigns in which your email marketing campaign is optimized to the preferences of your most socially valuable e-mail subscribers and targeted, based on social engagement.
E-mail subscribers who are socially engaged are commonly among a brand's most loyal customers. Email marketers who can use social networking better understand the customer and gather customer engagement information, can increase subscriber/customer loyalty and increase
customer lifetime value.