Archive for the ‘Email+Social’ Category

3 New Ways to Look at Channel Attribution with Social Magnet – Part 1: Monthly Reach

Thursday, February 16th, 2012

The most powerful feature in the tracking and reporting features of Social Magnet is the ability to measure channel attribution in all new ways. At the very top level, you can send a message out through email, Twitter and Facebook simultaneously, and then see which channel drives the most clicks. Over time, you’ll learn which content types are best suited for each channel, but even before that learning takes place it’s immediately apparent how much each channel is contributing to the objectives of the message.

In addition to measuring attribution at the message level, Social Magnet allows marketers to measure monthly reach, monthly productivity and clicks per person. Today I’ll look at Monthly Reach, with subsequent posts focusing on the rest.

Monthly Reach

Reach isn’t a term normally associated with email, used instead in advertising to measure the number of people (at least theoretically) exposed to an ad. In online advertising, reach may be the number of times your ad is served (even if it’s served below the fold and the “viewer” never actually views it). In print, it could be the circulation of the magazine, though the assumption that every subscriber looks at every page is similarly flawed. What’s important about any metric though is that its errors are standardized. With email, we could say that the number of opens is equal to reach, though there are many of our subscribers who do read a message without registering as opens because they turn off images. On the social side, we have no idea how many people on Twitter see our tweets. Facebook does probably the best job with reach by actually counting the number of times a post appears on somebody’s news feed, or is viewed on a brand’s wall.

But the least common denominator across email, Facebook and Twitter is simply the size of the audience. If you have 10,000 email subscribers, your reach is 10,000. 500 Facebook fans and 500 Twitter followers makes your reach in those channels 500. None is completely accurate but at least their inaccuracies are shared. In this case, reach is the number of times your message may be seen by a member of your audience.

When comparing email to social, reach is most valuable when measured over a period of time. The reason is that most brands send social messages far more frequently than email, and measuring over time normalizes the channels against this frequency. I like to use a month, but you can choose any period that fully represents 1 or more cycles in your marketing. (eg If you send out a monthly newsletter, don’t calculate weekly reach only for the week you send it, as that discounts all the activity from your other channels when your email is inactive.)

Let’s create a fictitious scenario to demonstrate why normalizing reach across time is so important to channel attribution. Here’s what Company M’s marketing balance sheet looks like:

- Email: 10,000 subscribers, mail a 1x weekly newsletter (4.3x / month)
- Facebook: 500 fans, post 1x daily on weekdays only (21.5 / month)
- Twitter: 500 followers, tweet 4x daily on weekdays only (86 / month)

The email audience is significantly larger than social – 20 times as large, in fact. But because the messaging frequency is so much higher in social channels (a function of message ease, message length and market expectations), the monthly reach tells a very different story. To calculate, simply multiply the number of messages per month by the size of the audience, thusly:

- Email: 43,000 monthly reach
- Facebook: 10,750 monthly reach
- Twitter: 43,000 monthly reach

Even though Company M’s email list is 20x the size of its Twitter audience, it messages on Twitter 20x more frequently, making the monthly reach of each channel the same. Now there are nuances here, to be sure. For example, is a tweet as powerful a brand message as an email? And what about frequency? Email frequency is only 4.3 per month, while Twitter audiences are exposed to 86 messages per month. Which is ideal?

The answer, as usual, is “it depends.” And part of what it depends on is how well these numbers translate into response. That’s what I’ll look at next time – Monthly Productivity.

Using Email + Social to Find Demand for More Email

Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

We’ve been using the Social Magnet intensively for about a month now, pushing a lot of our social content through it, crafting some A/B tests to measure social’s impact on email, and otherwise immersing ourselves in the application daily.  There is tons more to learn, but now we’ve got the opportunity to look at all of January for some trends and insight. The first report I looked at was eye-opening:

jancomparative

Click to enlarge.

What you’ll see when you open up the image is that for the campaigns we’ve allocated to Social Magnet comparison, we’re seeing more clicks coming from our social channels than we are from email. The Comparative Overall Statistics Report shown above indicates the number of messages sent in each channel, and the total number of clicks. In social channels, it includes clicks from Retweets and Facebook shares, and the email clicks include anything generated from pass-along as well. So it’s an apples-to-apples comparison in that the numbers reflect the total number of clicks per channel (though not necessarily limited to the direct audience of each channel).

Data points are interesting, but knowledge is genuinely useful. So I ran another report to see if I could figure out where all of social’s productivity is coming from. This report compares our messages and clicks by message category. You’ll see we have a category for Newsletters, one for Webinars and another for Blogs:

janbycategory

Click this one to enlarge too.

The A-HA! finding in this chart is the third column entitled blogs, which attributes 220 clicks to Twitter and zero to email. This is the category I assign to all social posts that point to a new article on the blog, or an article from the blog archives. We publish to the blog a few times a week – far too frequently to accompany each post with an email pointing to it. But Twitter and Facebook are ideally suited to pointing to blog articles, as well as other content that is interesting and relevant, but not important enough by itself to co-opt inbox attention (unless of course you have an opt-in newsletter expressly on blog content). Our social channels, then, allow us to better merchandise engaging content in ways that email does not currently do for us.

Next I drilled down a little deeper and looked at the Activity Calendar for the month. The calendar shows when every email and social post were published – social posts are light blue and purple, and the red are emails.

Click this one too.

Part of the reason we’re generating more clicks through social is because the volume of social activity is greater. Even though our social audience is a fraction the size of our email list, we are pushing content through Twitter and Facebook much more frequently.

By looking at all of these reports together, we’re able to draw a couple of unexpected conclusions:

First, our audience has an appetite for more engaging content than what we are currently sending via email.
Second, we have an opportunity to send more email.

That’s not the conclusion I was expecting to find, frankly. But if our audience is responding to the shorter, narrower content that we’re publishing in social channels, they are engaged with the brand more than once or twice a month. So I’m currently developing a new weekly niche newsletter that I expect a smaller segment of our audience will opt into, but will give us the opportunity to reach this highly engaged segment more regularly in the inbox.

Normally I’d stop short of saying that Email + Social analytics is like a box of chocolates. But it is Valentine’s Day, and you do never know what you’re going to get.

 

 

Email + Social Integration: It’s About Testing, not Technology

Thursday, February 9th, 2012

For my article in MediaPost this month, I wrote about the new Email + Social tools hitting the market, with 0ur own Social Magnet being one of them. The article is not about the tools themselves, but what we as email marketers can now do because of them. We can get smart. Not just data-point-in-the-marketing-meeting smart; I think Email + Social can fundamentally change the way we conduct digital communications. Behind the scenes over here, we’re working hard to figure out exactly how it will change. It’s a long but highly motivating process, and the article here is an update on some of the first steps to take if you’re working in parallel to us, integrating Email + Social at your own organization.

Email + Social Integration: It’s About Testing, not Technology
by Mike May
published in MediaPost’s Email Insider, 2-8-2012

For a while, the concept of email + social integration was limited to discussions about how to use email to bolster your social media programs, and vice versa. The early recommendations weren’t for integration as much as they were for coordination, to make sure your email self knows what your social self is up to. Fast-forward a year, and now there are bona fide integration tools hitting the market: technology that allows marketers to track the response to social messages (likes, comments, retweets, clicks, even conversion) right alongside email, and measure the contribution that each channel makes towards marketing objectives.

It’s easy to get drawn into the technology and spend hours poring over tracking reports that show what percentage of the clicks to that webinar promotion came from Twitter as opposed to email, or if your mobile audience is reaching you more from the inbox or Facebook. That’s the first step in adopting any new marketing technology: learning what you can learn. It’s energizing and fun, and flings previously hidden doors wide open.

But we’re email marketers, so the real appeal is not merely finding new data points to share in the weekly marketing meeting. We suddenly have a litany of new tests to devise and run. Email + social integration technology can meaningfully improve our marketing. All we have to do is approach it with the same curiosity and analysis that have allowed us to achieve such a remarkable ROI from email over the years. So let’s do that.

Scale objectives to your organization: The principal reason definitive “best practices” will remain elusive in email + social is because the relative audience size of organizations’ email list and social followers varies significantly. Some organizations have hundreds of thousands of email subscribers and 5,000 Facebook fans. Others have 7 million fans but under a hundred thousand subscribers. What you measure should be a function of what you want to achieve with email + social, which comes down to the relative strategic importance of each channel. Is your aim to use email to lift your social results, use social to improve your email, or find new ways that email + social can work together to improve marketing holistically?

Identify key metrics: Once you decide on your objective, it’s time to figure out the (all new) key metrics to track. For example, you’ll be able to measure the average click rate per audience member across channels, to determine a direct response exchange rate between social audiences and email subscribers. Normalizing for frequency will be important as well; many organizations tweet several times per day or more, and email far less frequently. So metrics that measure clicks or other engagement should be analyzed over a period of time instead of per message. (You may have a smaller Twitter audience that generates fewer clicks to your weekly sale than your weekly email, but you can hit this Twitter audience 12 times over the course of the week — how do those total clicks then stack up to that one-time email?)

Now test something already: Every new metric gets you a little smarter about how email + social work together, but regimented tests are necessary to build credible hypotheses that we can challenge more aggressively. Test examples might be taking an A/B split of email list and measuring response to email before and after social activity on the same topic. Or reversing the test, and tweeting on a topic, then emailing, and tweeting again afterwards to see which tweet drives more response. Do successful tweets make good subject lines? Can you lift the impact of newsletters by using social media to tease them, or by linking Web versions of them in Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn? The tests you can devise are limited only by your own creativity, though ought to be guided by your objectives as well.

Repeat tests redundantly again too: There are more variables in email + social than in email alone, not the least of which is the temporal nature of social content. Social content is not sticky like email, waiting around in a queue for its recipient to open, click or otherwise triage. For this reason, much email + social learning will be based on finding some consistency in the social component, or having enough trials to average out the inconsistency and turn it into actual learning. Early tests will reveal some data to help you crystallize hypotheses, but I think far more repeats will be necessary before you can draw strong conclusions. And even then, your relative audience sizes and engagement levels in all channels will ebb and flow, so you will have to continually challenge your previous findings with new tests.

The most powerful learning for an organization, then, will not be to figure out which email + social tactics produce the best results today, but rather to develop the flexibility and processes to continually test and learn so that results continue to improve despite the changing landscape. As email marketers, the test-hypothesize-retest-challenge protocol is already part of our culture. It’s just one more reason I think email marketers are uniquely qualified to succeed in social.

 

Learning What to Learn from Email + Social

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

I had a boss once who introduced me to the phrase, “in position to be in position.” He would use it to mean we had made enough headway on an initiative to almost be ready to see some results. It would be nice if all initiatives in business worked like a light switch, and you could just switch them on and they’d go. The reality though is that most initiatives – whether they’re a product launch or a marketing promotion or a new business partnership – have a discovery period that you enter with a hypothesis, but one you should be prepared to modify if your initial assumptions don’t bear out. In my experience, I’ve found myself “in position to be in position” after this period, where I have some conviction in my hypotheses and can start to execute on the strategy.

Now that we’ve started using and testing Social Magnet, we’re in position to be in position to learn a lot about email + social. Combining email and social in the ways Social Magnet allows is all new, and I don’t yet know what we’ll learn. In fact, we’re in the stage of learning what we’ll be able to learn – another version of being in position to be in position. Here are some of the assumptions we have going into this process, what we’re testing, and what we hope to learn:

Impact of social media on email results: One of our assumptions is that there is a lot of crossover between the email and social audiences of many companies, particularly in the B-to-B space. If that’s the case, then messaging in all channels increases frequency among the people who are attentive in all channels. So what happens when the same message is promoted across email and social? Will social messages lift email results from the added frequency? Or will the results from social cannibalize the results from email if they reach the audience first? We ran a test earlier this week promoting a webinar to see. We ran an A/B test of the email list, mailing to the first half before we promoted the same link on Facebook and Twitter, and then mailing to the other half after the social messaging. We saw a difference, but not one that was statistically relevant. Not yet anyway – if we see the same small difference over the next 4 or 5 tests, we might be onto something. Or we might have to revise our assumptions. Or our results may change as our list and audience sizes change (our email list is significantly larger than our social audience currently). As you can imagine, there are a ton of variables that can’t be isolated for a perfect testing environment. So for now, we’re not testing our results as much as testing our tests.

Impact of email on social media results: Social Magnet allows us to measure the number of clicks and (if we’re using Real Magnet’s events module for registrations) even conversions that come from all of our channels. Just as social messaging may impact email’s results, it’s equally likely that people who see something in their inbox may be more inclined to act on a message from the same brand on Facebook or Twitter. It’s plausible, at least. So we’re looking at ways to test that, and see if we can identify some situations where email messages that may not drive inbox engagement still lift results measurably in other channels. Intuitively, it makes sense. It’s only now that we’ve had a tool to put some serious thought into how to measure it.

Performance of different message types by channel: Like most marketers, we promote everything in all our channels. If something goes onto the blog, it may also show up in an email newsletter, on Facebook, Twitter and in LinkedIn. Some of what we do I’d classify as informational – like this blog, for example, or Tuesday’s blog about Subject Lines, or Chris’ blog earlier this week about Deliverability Numbers. Other messages are promotional or direct response, like a webinar registration reminder or a whitepaper download for lead generation. In Social Magnet, you can categorize any message – email, Twitter, Facebook and soon LinkedIn. It works very similar to a blog, where you determine what content categories you would like to group messages within, and then simply select one when you publish your message. We currently have a number of informational message categories, including Blogs (where we measure how much lift our own blogs get from our social channels), Articles (similar to Blogs, but measuring the clicks to articles we publish or are quoted in such as MediaPost and Mobile Marketer), Images (used to measure the pickup of any kind of images we post, principally socially) and Pass-Along (where we group any social messages that pass along links to articles that have nothing to do with us, but which we find interesting or influential enough to share). We have another category for Webinars on the promotional side, and one more for Newsletters. Once we have enough data, we might have some insight about which channels are best for different message types. It could be some highly actionable learning, as marketers could then fine-tune their messaging by content, improving targeting by channel while at the same time reducing clutter by limiting messages to the channel they perform best in.

You’ll notice I haven’t once said “best practices” in this whole piece. My hypothesis does not allow for them. I don’t expect to find any universal truths about combining email and social, and fully expect that what I learn is only partly applicable to other marketers. Instead, what I hope to learn – and share – is the process by which we’re discovering what works for us. The findings may not be replicable from one company to the next, but learning what you can learn from email and social is something that we can all do.

Getting Our Smart On in LinkedIn “Email + Social” Group

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

I’ve been in the email business since 1997. I think it’s near impossible to do anything for 15 years and not get bored. I’ve managed to stay engaged with email for that long because every 2-3 years, something big changes within the industry, causing all us email marketers to find new ways to keep our metrics humming and ROI high.

Social media is responsible for not one, nor two, but now three of the big shifts in email marketing, thusly:

1. Social Media as a Threat to email (2009 – 2010): A few years ago, the rapid rise of Facebook and Twitter prompted quite a few people close to social media to pronounce the imminent demise of email marketing. Very few people who actually used and relied on email joined the chorus, however. But we devoted no small amount of energy towards reassuring email marketers that all of their email skills and permission-based assets were as valuable as ever. Because they were, and they still are.

2. Email coexists with Social Media (2011): Once it was clear the sky was in no danger of falling, the email + social conversation shifted from how social would marginalize email to how email and social could c0-exist, perhaps even symbiotically. Share-With-Your-Network (SWYN) features were launched and at least one article per week in industry trades was on how to use email to improve social, and/or vice versa. The biggest distinction between this period and the fear, uncertainty and doubt that preceded it is that the prevailing sentiment here was based on sound strategy instead of Chicken Little sensationalism, and has proven to be largely true. My own personal take is that email and social are both permission-based channels, so the skills for success in them spring from the same strategy. I believe email marketers are uniquely qualified to succeed in social, so adopting a channel agnostic attitude for communications can benefit us significantly.

3. Email + Social Integration (2012): Here’s where we are today – looking for new ways for email and social not just to lift each other, but to work together in ways that produce all new insights and intelligence for marketers. If I knew what they all were already my job would be really easy – but also kind of boring. The truth is that none of us know what we’ll learn from analytics that measure the productivity of each channel within marketing communications. Will we learn that tweeting right before an email goes out lifts open rates? Or maybe that the net clicks from a campaign are actually higher if the email goes first followed by tweets? How will we optimize communications across channels for the maximum response? Is the ROI on growing our social audiences higher than growing our house list?

emailSocialLike I said, I don’t know the answers to those questions, and dozens more we can now start to ask about integrated digital communications. But we aim to find the answers, which really means finding the ways each of us individually can answer them for our own organizations. One of the ways we’ll be doing that is by sharing everything we discover on the new LinkedIn Email + Social group we started. Whether your job depends on integrating digital communications or you’re just a curious lurker, I encourage you to join the group and participate as much or little as you’d like. It’s really one of those topics that can only benefit from as much brainpower we can connect to it.

New Study: Does Social Media Integration Come Down to Good Old ROI?

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

A new study by InSites Consulting on social media integration within organizations is making its rounds through the trades today. A 42-slide presentation by the researcher is up on SlideShare here, and there is a pretty comprehensive assessment over on MarketingProfs. InSite also published a short 1-page summary here. The study ends up being pretty relevant to almost any organization in the way it benchmarks social media adoption and integration across different vertical industries, B2B vs B2C, and company size. No matter who you are, you can see how you stack up to other companies like yours.

I find the report particularly interesting in the distinction it makes between social media “adoption” and “integration.” Lots of businesses already have Facebook pages (69%), corporate Twitter accounts (57%), LinkedIn pages (47%) and YouTube channels (43%). But far fewer are actively in the process of integrating social media (23%) or have already done so (14%).

The biggest obstacle cited between adoption and integration is that management sees “no clear financial benefits.” The study does point out that there is a clear correlation between organizations that are well down the social integration road and financial performance: the companies that integrate social better tend to make more money. What isn’t clear is the causality – do the companies that integrate social do better as a result of the integration, or is it that the more successful companies possess the organizational structure, culture or other attributes that make them more likely to move aggressively into social integration?

I think the answer lies in the perceived obstacle. A lot of companies – particularly in B2B – are interested in social media inasmuch as it makes the phone ring. If they can’t clearly see how Facebook generates leads, ie, they see “no clear financial benefits” to integrating social, they’re less likely channel resources away from what they know works (or at least know used to work and hope will work again one day). As we integrate Social Magnet into our internal email and social media channels, I’m particularly mindful of that perspective as it’s a question I hear pretty commonly. Why should I move money into social? What should I take it out of?

My hypothesis is that an organization that is active and successful in social media becomes more approachable, which makes prospects more likely to post a comment on Facebook, reply to a tweet, ask a question in the comments field of a blog, or even pick up the phone. I’m seeing if that hypothesis bears out in the analytics on Social Magnet. In addition to giving marketers a clear picture of their social activity, Social Magnet is unique in that its analytics compare productivity across all channels. For example, we’ll post a link to a blog post (maybe this one, in fact) on Facebook and Twitter, and also include it an an upcoming email newsletter. We’ll then be able to see which channel drove the most links, which helps paint a picture of how productive your social channels are compared to email. As a marketer, I find data like that – the kind that gives you clear conviction in your marketing decisions – pretty irresistible.

Email+Social’s “Chuck Fruit Moment”

Thursday, January 12th, 2012

In my MediaPost column this week, I wrote on “Email+Social’s ‘Chuck Fruit Moment’“. We’re neck deep in integrating email and social media and over the next few months here you’ll see lots more about what we’re doing, what we’re learning and how to best use the features of Social Magnet. Our aim is to become experts on this burgeoning field so that you can become experts too.

Email+Social’s “Chuck Fruit Moment”
by Mike May
published in MediaPost’s Email Insider, 1-11-12

I was working at the Interactive Advertising Bureau a decade ago when I first heard the term “Chuck Fruit Moment.” Chuck Fruit was the head of marketing for Anheuser-Busch in 1979 when he agreed to a meeting with a group of entrepreneurs set to launch the first all-sports television network: ESPN. Where others would have seen risk, Chuck Fruit saw a huge opportunity — for his brand to own all of sports. He signed a $15 million deal to be the exclusive beer sponsor with the fledgling network, a move that is credited with not only launching the venerated cable TV brand, but establishing cable TV as a legitimate advertising channel in its own right.

I can’t remember what we ultimately decided was online advertising’s Chuck Fruit Moment. It may have been in 2001 when Volvo launched a car exclusively online, or in 2002 when Frito-Lay’s Cammie Dunaway diverted budget from the Super Bowl to online ads, or in 2003 when Starcom MediaVest included online properties in its upfront. Regardless, it was not a moment we could have created ourselves. Our job instead was to help create the conditions under which such a moment could exist, and then of course get in front of the parade once it started, like a good trade association should.

We’re in a very similar position in the email industry right now. Email does not face quite the same threat of marginalization that online advertising did a decade ago, but the rise (in popularity and panache) of social media and increased inbox clutter are acting as a catalyst for change within email. The industry could move in a number of different directions, but the one that seems most likely is for email to become part of a broader digital communications platform, more tightly integrated with social, mobile and other channels.

The Chuck Fruit Moment for email will be the event that changes marketers’ perspective on the role email plays within communications strategy. It could mean recognizing that the branding or frequency impact of a subject line is as powerful as a well-crafted tweet, or that Facebook fans make the most profitable email list subscribers when tended carefully in both channels. I don’t know what event could be the actual moment, or what brand has enough sway to drive it. But in order for it to occur, there are still a number of conditions that need to be met within email:

1. Tools for the job. Already we are seeing email companies creating dashboards to monitor, analyze and even create communications for social, mobile and the inbox alike. Soon I expect we will see the social dashboards building out or partnering for email capabilities and approaching the market from the other side. In another side of the digital landscape, we have seen search marketing firms expand into Internet marketing companies, including SEO, SEM, content marketing, Google AdWords, Facebook advertising and any other tactic that aids in lead generation. Look for email to fit similarly into a suite of services organized around engagement, qualification and retention.

2. Email perceived as more digital than direct. At many companies, email is run separately from social media, SEM, PR and other channels, even those principally digital. Some organizations have “advanced” or “emerging” technologies groups that focus on social and mobile, but omit email because of its tenure, despite the rich potential for integration. Instead, email is considered a direct channel, and operated and evaluated largely within a direct marketing context. Email is direct, but that is not all it is. For email’s Chuck Fruit Moment to occur, marketers must stop asking, “How many sales of this thing can we get out of our email list, and how many more off social?” and start asking, “How can we best sell this thing using all our digital communications together?”

3. Integrated digital marketing functional expertise. Right now, there is no standard operating procedure for what marketing function controls which channel. Social is commonly in PR, but not always. Email often runs out of the catalog or events group, because they have already built familiarity with one set of metrics with which to evaluate email. But there are as many exceptions as there are rules, and you can make a case for almost any marketing function at almost any company to lay claim to email, social or mobile.

The commonality, though, is that the channels are usually managed separately because the functional expertise is typically limited to a channel. You’ve been trained in email, or she is an expert in social media, or he is our in-house mobile maven. In order for the channels to be integrated, the functional expertise of integrated digital marketing must exist. This is likely to start at smaller companies where there isn’t enough staff to support specialists in each discipline, and where enterprising marketers — armed with the right new tools — can start to experiment with integrated digital marketing.

4. Metrics and insights must contribute to tactics. Email is a channel where learning comes quickly; analytics are readily available — and with them, the institutional knowledge of how to turn insights into improved performance. For any sort of integrated marketing movement to fully succeed, the same insights-beget-improvement analytics need to exist.

I think the idea is less to make social as individually accountable as email; that won’t happen without some seriously creepy back-channel tracking taking place. Rather, marketers need to find ways to analyze, evaluate and then act on the metrics that are available across multiple channels: device, geolocation, time of day, frequency and other attributes. And the analytics must show the benefit of integrating the communications.

For example, learning that tweeting a link to a new product page drives 15% more clicks when it hits the airwaves within one hour after an accompanying email reaches inboxes would compel many retailers to look earnestly at integrated digital marketing.

5. Coinage. I’ve been saying “integrated digital marketing,” but that’s probably not the right term. Someone has to come up with it, and then someone (maybe someone else) has to make it stick.

Note that I haven’t expressly said that Facebook or Twitter or Google+ or LinkedIn have to do anything in particular — they don’t. The right set of features or data availability could certainly spur integrated marketing along, but the conditions that could enable email’s Chuck Fruit Moment are within our own reach.