E-mail Engaging and Perpetuating Proprietary Audiences
If you aren’t building, engaging and activating proprietary audiences of your own, you’re falling behind.
—Jeffrey Rohrs, author of Audience
Constant changes from Facebook and other social networks have made brands wean off these networks as a source for audience correspondence and content marketing. But only to a point. The organic reach restrictions obviously infuriate many brands now forced to pay for reach. But wise brands see the advantage in blending the viral capabilities of social networks with the messaging control of e-mail and phone text.
Having access to e-mail and SMS contact information is vital to the process of escorting audiences through the sales funnel. Just having content go viral, for example, does little for brands seeking intelligence on who is interested in their offerings and where they are in their buying journey. But the social networks play a key role in expanding the funnel.
Why E-mail-Engaged Audiences Require Social Media
Facebook, in particular, provides one of the greatest sources of audience development at the top of the funnel (ToFu). Their custom audience and look-alike audience features administered through their Power Editor shows great promise in building databases for lead generation. For example, the web custom audience feature allows you to capture the ID of your website visitors where Facebook finds this person when they arrive on the social network. At that time, they could be served a retargeted ad. Better yet, a strong welcome incentive invites them as a fan, where they may submit an e-mail. And the cycle continues as shown in Figure 11.1.
Using social networks to attract followers—and e-mails to correspond with them directly–is a great way to jumpstart e-mail campaigns that could track downloading behaviors; store this intelligence in CRM or marketing automation systems; and tailor a response appropriate to the prospects buying stage. Now imagine Facebook fetching more contacts for you from their look-alike audience features as you acquire more opt-ins from blog subscriptions, apps, webinar registries, or downloaded e-Books? Your funnel gets wider and your leads get more qualified.
Why Social Media Requires E-mail
As discussed in previous chapters, there are many effective approaches for leveraging social media and SEO to extend the visibility of your content. But sales nurturing goes beyond ToFu lead generation. Nurturing requires the following intelligence on your target’s needs and buying stage:
Figure 11.1 Combining Social And E-Mail To Build Proprietary Audience
1. Who downloaded the content?
2. What topic areas about the content piqued the interest of your target?
3. What follow-up response would be appropriate?
4. How urgent is their need?
Without some sort of e-mail-marketing guidance, social media would merely serve as a viral marketing tool leaving your hard-earned content wandering in space. Yes, a high-populated social community or well-SEO blog can spread the word about your brand. Your friends and followers can even endorse your brand or content through likes, shares, or comments. But with only SEO and social media to promote your content, you are essentially limited to the spreading of brand awareness (the ToFu stage).
Even the best of social-media newsfeed posts, retweets, and other communications cannot tell you much about your target audience’s intended use of your content. The target simply gets educated through your content. They may even grasp the manner in which it addresses your problem. But you are left with no evidence of their interests in your content talking points let alone your ultimate offer.
When coupled to e-mail campaigns, however, you can now guide and track your content delivery. Why is this important? Without knowing the problem-solving urgency or stage of buying for your target, your content is aimlessly bouncing off wasted eyeballs. Left without any tracking intelligence, you will likely end up pummeling your targets with even more ToFu content. Moreover, you may end up pre-empting your content sequencing with premature bottom-of-the-funnel offers.
Either way, you lack a vehicle for tracking download behaviors. And without tracking what piqued their interest, your follow-up is not aligned with their buying stage. You are left instead with an intrusive broadcasting style of content since you have no way to reel in your leads.
E-mail 2.0 Serves to Educate as Opposed to Promote
This is where e-mail 2.0 plays a vital role. E-mail 2.0 is essentially e-mail in the world of social media and mobile. But unlike prior generations of e-mail used primarily for broadcasted offers, e-mail 2.0 is aimed at sales nurturing. This nurturing starts with a “permission only” process—preferably double opt-in—for legitimately obtaining an address. It then educates your audience as opposed to selling them on untimely marketing messages. In essence, you are escorting your sales leads down the social sales funnel.
For example, most well-crafted middle of the funnel (MoFu) warrants an e-mail address in exchange for what your target perceives as a gift. This gift may include a free white paper, e-Book, or webinar registration. Not only do you get the address in exchange for rich content, but your target should also not feel intruded or bombarded with irrelevant information.
E-mail 2.0 Provides Intelligence to Steer Your Content
Some of the objections with prior generation e-mail blasts and social media is that they were promotional in nature. With only 5–25 percent of your site traffic ready to do business and 50 percent of qualified leads not ready to buy immediately, pushing your targets often leads to losing them.
Imagine instead that streams of MoFu content are tracked across every e-mail call to action. In her book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale, Ardath Albee points out several examples of how e-mail, CRM, and social behaviors collectively provide powerful tracking insights.1 Consider the case of the real-estate accounting firm targeting property managers. Over the course of newsletter deliveries, webinar hosting, and podcast releases, the following information would be captured by the e-mail’s associated CRM system.
We know from the CRM system that the target:
1. is a property manager;
2. is highly interested in the topic with some sense of urgency based on the fast response to e-mail and webcast activity;
3. has a high level of interest in the accounting services; and
4. is late in the buying cycle.
Figure 11.2 Sample E-Mail Campaign for Real-Estate Accounting Firm
Setting Campaign Objectives
The key to effectively utilizing e-mails in lead nurturing is to adopt a plan for campaigns, digests, or follow-up correspondence that keeps your audiences engaged. The following campaign objectives are most often considered by heavy users of e-mail marketing:
1. introducing your firm’s offerings through product or service announcements;
2. enhancing your brand reputation, building trust, and renewing relationships through e-newsletters;
3. informing and educating your audiences through speaking engagements, workshop events, and webinars; and
4. generating more sales through special offers.
Once the campaign objects are considered, content topics or event forums should be defined in line with these objectives. Notice how this is done in Figure 11.2 for the case of the real-estate accounting firm.
Note
1. Ardath Albee. Ardath, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale. New York: McGraw-Hill. 2010.