Returning from Connections 2011, we’re catching our breath and taking the time to reflect on the key messages and new trends in email marketing this year. And nothing stood out more than the importance of integrating your email marketing with your social campaigns to engage your social audience. After all, your social media following have the ability to encourage your audience to make a purchase or choose not to buy a certain product.
Because some people have a higher rate of engaging with their social audience, they have a higher social influence. Companies should be monitoring the social influence of their friends and followers to ensure their customers are happy and their following is viewing the most positive feedback.
In addition, it becomes ever more important to identify the key “influencers” in your social networks as they have the ability to become evangelists and promoters of your organization.
If you’re measuring the impact of social influencers, you can develop and send them increasingly relevant messages at the right time via the right channel. Many companies are engaging with customers via social to keep customers happy and to keep them coming back.
But as marketing channels increasingly proliferate and become more necessary to attain an effective cross-channel marketing campaign, it can get downright head-spinning to think about managing the output and interaction, let alone measuring the impact and engagement level among all of these marketing channels.
You might be comfortable with email marketing, but consumers are actively engaged in conversations on mobile technologies and social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn, and so on. In order to optimize your business processes and email marketing results, campaign activities need to be integrated across multiple marketing channels including mobile, email, and the web.
ExactTarget has partnered with Klout and features CoTweet to offer a one-stop-shop social media suite, called the Interactive Marketing Hub. Through the Interactive Marketing Hub, users can manage their social networks from one central location as well as measure the social influence of their followers and friends on Twitter and Facebook. Klout is a tool that measures social influence, and CoTweet is a way to manage and respond to comments, postings, retweets, mentions, etc. from one centralized location, regardless of which social networking site they originated from. With an integrated view of the users and influencers across all social channels, and the ability to segment and analyze this data, cross-channel marketing becomes not only feasible, but easy.
For more information about the Interactive Marketing Hub from ExactTarget, contact us today: We’re happy to connect you!
About the Author: Sharon
