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Archive for the ‘Email+Social’ Category

Does Social Content Make Good Email Copy?

Thursday, August 23rd, 2012

Originally published in MediaPost’s Email Insider, 8-21-12.

I’ve written before about how email and social media are similar, in that they are both permission-based channels (or earned media) that require a similar approach to content strategy. Engagement and empathy work better than interruption and incessancy.

But are email and social media similar enough to share not just a content strategy, but actual content? An increasing number of marketers have remarked to me that it would be nice if emails could automatically pull content off the brands’ Facebook timelines or Twitter feeds, and auto-generate emails. It’s a question worth pondering. After all, many brands put more energy into creating social content than they do email, and some are seeing their engagement metrics go through the roof on Facebook, Pinterest and other social channels. The social content obviously does its job.

The other trend I’m seeing is that many senior social managers are moving into that position from the email group. With social in the marketing limelight, it makes sense for rising marketers to point their career path through social on the way to the executive suite.

Finally, email is harder to write than a tweet or status update. With many brands seeing open rates decline, why not just find a way to limit the resources required for email and automatically scrape-and-send the social content they know is engaging?

Brands who regard email as a non-strategic channel, valued principally as an undifferentiated means of distribution for content, may find the opportunity appealing. But marketers who have grown their email list over time and who rely on it as a source of revenue, customer retention or engagement will, I think, be disappointed by the results of repurposed social content. Here’s why:

1. No call to action: Social content engages so well because — in part — it asks very little of its audience. It is not salesy as much as chatty. But for marketers who rely on email to sell product, fill conference rooms, book hotel rooms or drive subscriptions, social content in the inbox cannot be organized or designed to do the job nearly as well. If emails cease being revenue generators, they will end up being evaluated by the same branding and engagement metrics that CEOs often insist cannot be tied to sales. More important, the sales lost in the email channel have to be made up somewhere else. Guess what happens when you try to turn your engaging social media into direct-response channels? Yup, you end up squandering them too. Better renew your USPS indicia permit.

2. Loss of relevance: Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter all rely on email to notify members about specific happenings in their network — when a friend has mentioned them, a colleague has added new skills or contacts, or even popular tweets that may have been missed. This type of tailored social content in the inbox is highly relevant. But when a brand sends an email exclusively about what is happening on its timeline or feed, it’s narcissistic. Social content within someone’s network answers the question, by definition, “What’s in it for me?” Your fans and followers don’t want an email about what you have posted on your timeline — any more than you’d like an email about whom they are now following on Twitter. When email content is no longer relevant, unbsubcribes increase.

3. Broken promises: For many brands, repurposing social content may be seen as a way to make better use of their existing email lists, particularly if they have stopped emailing altogether. But subscribers didn’t sign up to see a rehashed Timeline or Twitter feed, and sending them content not tailored for the channel may be perceived as a broken content promise. It also sends the message that your brand is not serious about the inbox, which leaves your subscribers less willing to give you any attention there, or even let you in.

4. Email’s critical editing function is lost: Email works best when content is carefully selected from all available sources and tailored around the interests of a particular audience or segment. It is less about creating content than it is identifying what content will appeal to different segment, and applying an effective editing function (whether that function should be human or algorithmic is a topic for another day.)

This editing function actually IS a way that social content can be integrated into the inbox. For example, an automotive brand that pushes out everything in its social sphere to its subscribers misses the mark with almost all the content. But let’s say the automotive brand just targets its segment interested in pickup trucks with carefully curated social content in emails, like photos posted to its Timeline by new pickup truck owners, Twitter conversations about compatible cargo bed liners and other aftermarket accessories, etc. Not only would this draw subscribers into the email in the same way it draws fans into the social content; it would also draw email prospects into the social channel itself.

Finding fresh and effective content for email is an ongoing challenge. Repurposing social content for the inbox by itself is not a viable email content strategy. But drawing on social channels in the same way we use our newsletters and other messages to point to our website, blog and other media does makes sense. The channels do require unique content, however. Your Timeline in the inbox won’t be any more effective than the print ads we used to email out a decade ago. Audiences are too discerning for that — a condition that we marketers ought to see as an opportunity, not a liability.

Posted in Email+Social, Published Articles | Comments Off

Taking Advantage of Perfect Attention and Anticipation in Your Confirmation Emails

Friday, August 10th, 2012

The confirmation email is one of the most overlooked pieces of marketing real estate. Almost all brands can make them work a little harder than they already do, with some modifications that communicate your most strategic messages when your audience is at their most attentive. We all use them – to confirm someone’s email subscription or webinar registration, thank someone for a purchase, or to provide a link to download a whitepaper or digital good. In most cases, the message of these is as their name suggests – to confirm. They reassure your subscriber or customer that the action they took has set some wheels in motion so they don’t worry that their clicks on your website were lost in the ether somewhere. The secondary purpose of most confirmation emails is to essentially read back to your customer what they just told you: this is what you subscribed to or purchased or registered for. In addition to further reassurance, this leaves a trail in the inbox.

The engagement potential of the confirmation email though is significantly higher than just closing the loop on some activity. Unlike almost any other email your brand sends to a subscriber, the confirmation email reaches its audience at the peak of engagement. Not only are their recipients anticipating the email; they are expecting it, and will think something is wrong if they don’t receive it. This moment of perfect attention and anticipation may be the only time we as email marketers have nearly 100% certainty that the message we are sending will be read.

What should we do with this perfect attention? Here are some examples:

Leave the loop open. The function of most confirmation emails is to close the loop – to put an end to the conversation that started with the signup or purchase or registration. But as marketers, we work really hard to open these conversations in the first place – why do we suddenly truncate them just when they’re getting interesting? Instead of just saying “OK, thanks. Bye!” here are a few ways to keep use the engagement you’ve earned to bring your new subscriber or customer even deeper into the fold:

Thanks for subscribing to the newsletter. You can see archives of our past newsletters here, and we also post them on our Facebook timeline.

Your registration to the Annual Conference is confirmed. Here is a list of the other pre-registered attendees. You can also view an interactive exhibitor map here and even start organizing some meetings with your next technology partner.

Thank you for registering for our upcoming webinar. If you have colleagues who would be interested as well, please point them to the webinar registration page or just forward this email to them.

Cross-sell, not upsell. You’ve got their attention with the confirmation email, but don’t push it too far. If someone just signed up to receive a monthly newsletter and you use the confirmation to try to sell them a $1200 conference, you’re squandering the attention, not nurturing it. Instead, suggest they take actions at a similar level of engagement to what they’ve done:

Your webinar registration is complete and your receipt for the $99 registration fee is below. See also our AM and half-day seminars and other in-person events, ranging from $80 – $240.

Thanks for signing up for our weekly newsletter. You might also like our Facebook page where we post slides, videos and photos from our events. Or you could follow us on Twitter where we share the most relevant industry news and research.

Return the engagement favor. Even if you don’t have anything to sell them or any place to send them, make sure the language in your confirmation emails honors the attention they have lent you. Most confirmation emails sound like unseasoned meat tastes – bland and uninspired. But these people have just taken the action that a big part of your job is devoted to. The language in your emails should reflect that, with personality, empathy and a more natural tone than most convey. Here are some real examples from my own inbox:

Great purchase, by the way. Your friends are going to be jealous. Your order should arrive on or before August 31, 2012, so you have until then to prepare them. (TheClymb.com)

Your order’s been sent to the restaurant, and your food’s about to get cooking. Now sit back, relax and get ready to enjoy. (Eat24)

Thanks for choosing Southwest for your trip! You’ll find everything you need to know about your reservation below. Happy travels! (Southwest Airlines)

What can your brand do to turn your confirmation emails into deeper engagement channels?

Posted in Email+Social, Engagement | Comments Off

VIDEO: Using Social Media to Improve Your Existing Email Program

Thursday, June 21st, 2012

TMA Resources invited Real Magnet to speak on Email Best Practices for its new video series. Here are some tips on using social media to improve your existing email program:

Posted in Best Practices, Email+Social, Engagement | Comments Off

Emailioration Monday, 6-11-12: Promote Social Alternatives on Unsubscribe Page

Monday, June 11th, 2012

Unsubscribes are inevitable, but they don’t always mean your subscribers just aren’t that into you. An increasing number of departures from email lists are not eschewing your brand as much as trying to manage the load on their inbox. I see a lot of brands try to talk customers out of unsubscribing, but a better tactic is to give them alternatives for keeping in touch with your brand. The Unsubscribe confirmation page then is a perfect place to promote your social channels and encourage folks to stay in the fold that way.Messages in social channels do not need to be managed and triaged in the same way as email, making them a little easier to live with for subscribers facing information overload.

If you have multiple channels (like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest) make sure you tell people what each one is used for so they can follow you wherever makes the most sense to them.

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Each week on “Emailioration Monday” we spotlight a single tactic you can implement this week in order to improve your email marketing. Share tips of your own on Twitter at #Emailioration, and see the full collection of Emailioration tips here.

Posted in Email+Social, Emailioration, Tips | Comments Off

Using Google Goals for Conversion Tracking

Friday, June 8th, 2012

Very soon we will be launching Conversion Tracking with Google Goals, which allows you to integrate the Goals you set within Google Analytics into your Real Magnet application. This allows you to see which messages – across email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – are responsible for any of the conversions you track, and even roll up the revenue per message so you know exactly how much this email or that tweet is really worth.

Normally when we hear “conversion tracking” we think of e-commerce, conference registrations, subscriptions or other online sales. But Google Goals goes beyond sales and allows you to measure almost any other activity on your website. Which means that the Real Magnet integration with Google Goals allows you to attribute almost any activity on your website to the exact message that prompted it.

Here are a few of the visitor behaviors you can track back to the channel and message level through Conversion Tracking with Google Goals:

Completion of an Action: On many sites, every conversion (whether it is a subscription to your email list, a request for a product demo, a purchase or registration) is concluded with a “Thanks for doing that” page. Google Goals allows you to use the specific URL from that page to signify the completion of the action that preceded it. Every time someone hits that page, you know what action they just took. (And now you’ll know what email or Tweet started it all.)

Google also introduced what it calls Event tracking last year. An Event could be the download of a specific white paper, or watching a product demo video for at least two minutes. Event tracking is useful for those activities you want your website visitors to take, but which may not have a specific URL associated with completion.

Site Engagement: You can also use Google Goals to measure the number of people who meet certain engagement criteria, such as viewing 5 or more pages in a visit, or spending at least 3 minutes on the site. Engagement trends can provide a lot of insight into the quality of your visitors. For example, you may find through Social Magnet that your Facebook posts are bringing in twice as much traffic as LinkedIn, but that your visitors from LinkedIn are far more likely to spend a meaningful amount of time on the site. Conversion Tracking with Google Goals allows you to see where your quality – as well as your quantity – is coming from.

Content Consumption: If you are promoting a new product, you may be particularly interested in all the activity on the page that promotes it. Conversion Tracking with Google Goals lets you turn that product page (or any page on your site) into a Goal, so you can see which messages result in the most visits to it. Note that with Google Goals the visit to the page does not have to be the first thing your audience does. Someone could follow a link on Facebook to your homepage, see a house ad to your featured product and then reach the page that way – that conversion would be attributed to Facebook (as it should be).

You can also track a “conversion” to an entire product category. For example, you could set up a Google Goal to measure the number of times any of your visitors reach any page in your blog, or view any of the offerings in your “Services” category, or read any of the pages in your “Case Studies” section. The system is very flexible, which makes it extremely powerful. All you need to do is take about 3 minutes to set up each goal that is important to you to measure – all the way back to the messages that drive your most strategically important website activities.

If you do not yet have Google Analytics, now is a great time to create an account (it’s free). If you do have it set up already, here’s a tutorial for creating Google Goals so you can get the most out of Real Magnet’s Conversion Tracking with Google Goals when it launches.

Posted in Analytics, Channel Attribution, Email+Social | Comments Off

Signal-to-Noise Ratio, And The Rise Of Channel-Specific Content

Wednesday, May 30th, 2012

For my article in MediaPost this week I picked up on a theme I spoke about at last week’s SIPA conference – Signal-to-Noise ratio. We know that all our communications channels rely on strong content, so it’s no wonder that when we create one we like to push it out through all of them. This is one of those practices that fails the “what if everyone does this?” test (which is important because everyone does, and there are more everyones every day). I foresee the rise of channel specific content in the very near future. Read the article to learn why, and what you can do to prepare.

Signal-to-Noise Ratio, And The Rise Of Channel-Specific Content
by Mike May
published in MediaPost’s Email Insider, 5-30-12

“We have to let everyone know about this.”

That phrase is common in marketing departments of all sizes, across all verticals, around the world. What “this” is could be a limited-time promotion, the opening of a conference’s registration, the receipt of a prestigious award — you name it. Whatever your brand, there is frequently something pertaining to it that is important enough to share with as many people as possible.

Up until recently, the common rejoinder to that phrase was, “OK, let’s send an email.” Today it is not so simple. Not only do most of us not enjoy 100% open rates consistently; we also do not limit ourselves to an audience in a single channel. So “Let’s send an email” has evolved into “Let’s send an email, put it up on Facebook, tweet it, post it to LinkedIn, pin it and put it on our blog.”

That’s a lot of messages, in a lot of channels. And since we inevitably have audience duplication across channels, it is also a lot of redundance. You can call it “increased frequency” if you like, but before too long your subscribers and fans and followers are going to start referring to it simply as noise.

Play it forward, and the rise of channel-specific content is inevitable. People may like a brand enough to follow it in multiple channels, but repeating the same messages everywhere will prompt your audience to choose one channel over the others, robbing your brand of incremental points of engagement. Today, channel-specific content is a sound marketing practice as it shows respect for the way your audience uses the inbox, Facebook, Twitter and other channels. Soon, however, channel-specific content designed to increase the signal-to-noise ratio will be the cost of doing business for any brand that wants all its channels to be as vibrant, engaged and responsive as possible.

Here are some steps for shifting your communications from pan-channel broadcasting to channel-specific content:

Describe each channel – to your audience and to yourself. When you invite your audience to subscribe, fan or follow, let them know exactly what kind of (unique) content they can expect in each channel. For example, you may use your email list for a weekly newsletter, Twitter for customer service, and Facebook for promotions. Promoting them as such is a form of targeting, as your audience is signing up for the specific content you are providing in each. It also helps build anticipation. This is an easy exercise if you already have some channel-specific content in place. But if all your descriptions look the same, it is a cue that you may be generating too much redundancy in your messaging and need to work on a content strategy that engages your audience in different ways.

Use your email analytics brain (and tools) on social channels to find the best-performing content. You already know how to use email analytics to measure the effectiveness of messages in the inbox. Now, the same sorts of tools are available to measure click-rate, conversion and other engagement metrics for social messages. Using them allows you to see not just how much each channel contributes to your marketing objectives, but also to identify which messages take advantage of each channel’s unique attributes to really shine. This level of intelligence is going to be vital very soon, as marketers will begin limiting messages to the channels in which they work best, in order to make sure that every message contributes meaningfully to its channel’s engagement.

Develop key metrics on channel engagement, not just message effectiveness. Much of the duplication we see across channels now is the result of optimizing at the message level; we try to squeeze as many clicks as possible out of each message by pushing it anywhere we have an audience. Instead, I believe marketers are going to need to focus on optimizing each channel instead of each message. Develop and track a set of key metrics for each message that measures how much engagement you are driving in aggregate across the channel. For example, you might track “Likes per Post” on Facebook, or “Mentions/RTs per Follower per Month” on Twitter. As with email, it is important to balance the near-term needs of your marketing objectives with the long-term health of your marketing programs. Reducing the signal-to-noise ratio and keeping a close eye on how engaged your audiences are across channels will ensure that you can count on each channel to move your business forward this quarter — as well as three years from now.

Posted in Channel Attribution, Content Strategy, Email+Social, Engagement, Published Articles | Comments Off

Slides from “How Email Marketers Can Become Experts at Social”

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012

Yesterday I presented on “How Email Marketers Can Become Experts at Social” at the SIPA 2012 conference in DC. I touched on the topic here on the blog last week, and expanded on it quite a bit in the presentation. The slides from the presentation are available for download for anybody who would like them:

Download “How Email Marketers Can Become Experts at Social” Slides

Thanks everyone who attended the session, particularly the two of you who laughed at my jokes.

Posted in Email+Social, Presentations | Comments Off

Why Email Marketers Are Uniquely Qualified for Social Media

Thursday, May 17th, 2012

Someone has to take the reins of your company’s social media strategy. It might as well be you. In fact, if you’re already managing the company’s email program, it really ought to be you.

Email marketers are uniquely qualified to succeed in social media because of the similarities between the two channels. The tactical execution is very different of course. Here are the principal tactical differences between email and social:

Ambient Atmosphere: The work inbox is still perceived largely as a place of business, even when personal messages occasionally infiltrate. But Facebook, Twitter and other social channels are more, well, social. The surrounding content creates a different atmosphere, and requires your messages to alter their tone or content in order to be effective.

Message Length: While email copy is getting shorter, marketers still have more real estate to work with than they do in social channels. Crafting tight, clear and engaging messages in one or two sentences for Facebook and Twitter is a new skill for email marketers, who traditionally compose in longer paragraphs or shorter subject lines.

Content Objectives: Most emails are composed around a call-to-action designed to compel subscribers to click a link, buy a product, register for a conference or perform some other action with an immediate benefit to the sending company. Social media differs in that the principal objectives are not always so direct-response related, but are instead organized around engagement. This affects the type of content as well, with questions, photos, polls, video and conversations frequently replacing calls-to-action in social channels.

Message Frequency: A brand can post on Facebook three to five times daily, and tweet even more frequently than that. The inbox is not nearly so tolerant of frequency, as every message to land there must be sorted, read, saved, deleted or otherwise triaged. Social messages are transient; if a fan or follower does not deal with or even see them, they do not pile up like emails.

Note that the operative word describing the differences here is tactical. The way to execute across email and social is different, but the channels spring from the same strategic similarity:

Email and Social are the only Permission-Based Channels.

Think about what that means. Email marketers have spent years earning permission to enter the inbox of the thousands or even millions of subscribers they rely on in order to move their businesses forward. Setting aside list buying (and I wish everyone would set aside list buying, frankly) there is simply no way to buy an audience’s attention in email, in the way that you can with advertising or direct mail, for example. Email marketers have learned that earning permission, turning it into attention, and ultimately building anticipation is a function of respect – respecting the attention that a subscriber has lent and not abusing it with too frequent or untargeted messages.

Email marketers not only understand the rules of permission, attention, anticipation and respect; for them it is simply second nature. Because social media is similarly permission-based, email marketers already possess the strategic underpinnings required to be successful there. They may not yet know how to write an effective engagement-driving post on Facebook, or which content strategy for Twitter takes full advantage of their brand’s assets in order to deliver value to an audience. But they do recognize that engagement and delivering value are the critical components here, not merely interrupting and announcing.

As you build out your brand’s social media strategy, remember that your roots in email give you a competitive advantage. Like you do with email, remain focused on delivering value with the content you create, and respecting the attention you have been given instead of taking advantage of it.

Posted in Email+Social | Comments Off

Conversion Reporting: Channel Attribution’s Last Mile

Friday, May 4th, 2012

Social Magnet’s principal value proposition is its ability to show marketers how much each channel – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or email – contributes to a campaigns results. It does this through a proprietary URL shortener that measures clicks and other engagement metrics at the message level. You send out a message through all of your channels and can see exactly how many clicks came from each place, which is some powerful direct response insight.

Not all clicks, however, are created equal. Sometimes however, you don’t want just a click – you want your visitor to take whatever action that click-through to your website precipitates. We have had an event registration module within Real Magnet for a long time, which many clients use for webinars, conferences, meetings and white paper downloads. Regardless of the application, it is essentially a shopping cart that collects purchase or registration data (and payment if necessary), and integrates fully with the rest of the Real Magnet application.

Wouldn’t it be cool, then, if Social Magnet didn’t just measure clicks, but also conversions? Well now it does. Our new Conversion Reporting allows you to see exactly how many webinar registrants or white paper downloads are attributed to each channel, and each message within each channel. Here’s what one of the reports looks like:

Click to enlarge.

Pictured here is an Overall Conversion Report, organized by channel. The data is for a single registration event (in this case, a white paper download campaign) and shows how many clicks and conversions are attributable to the messages within each channel that were used to promote the event.

I’ve been using the tool to promote our own white papers and webinars, and the level of insight gleaned pretty quickly can be eye-opening. Seeing which channel drives clicks can be very different from which channel drives conversions. For example, in the data above, Twitter is casting off a ton of clicks, but has only a 10% conversion rate. LinkedIn, by contrast, has a fraction of the clicks as Twitter, but at a 50% conversion rate is almost rivaling LinkedIn in total registrations.

Analytics should always drive action, so after seeing data like this a marketer may well conclude that LinkedIn is far more fertile ground for registrations, and put more energy into building an audience there or begin buying targeted ads.

I think the marketer’s job is not just to drive results, but also to understand why the results are being driven, in order to replicate success in the future. With so many digital channels at our disposal, channel attribution becomes critical, to make sure we focus our energy where it does the most good, squeezing all the productivity we can out of the resources we have available.

Posted in Analytics, Channel Attribution, Email+Social | Comments Off