Social Media and Email: Friend, Ally, or Frenemy?
With the rise of social media, many pundits trumpeted the old refrain that email is out of date and soon to perish. Yet, despite the rise in popularity of social media channels, email is still proving to be the most pervasive and effective method of directly marketing to and reaching customers. In their 2013 National Client Email Report, the Direct Marketing Association asserted that, “Email marketing remains critical to business, with 89% of respondents declaring email to be “important” or “very important” to their organization.”
Why Is This?
First, email dominates social media in terms of usage. There are over 4 billion email addresses globally. About 75% of these addresses are consumer accounts. In contrast, Facebook has about 2.2 billion users, of which only 1.4 billion are considered active. As of this writing, LinkedIn has 322 million users and Twitter has 288 million users. Thus, there are 2 times more users of email than of Facebook and 10 times more users of email than of Twitter or LinkedIn. And to get started with any of these social media channels, you need to have an email address too.
Not only are there more consumer users of email, but also business users utilize their email more extensively than social media channels. Let us check a few facts:
• Facebook—average user spends 21 minutes a day1
• LinkedIn—only 40% of users check it once a day
• Twitter—29% check more than once a day; 46% use it at least once a day
• Email—business email users read 105 messages a day; 92% of adults are using it; 61% use it every day
Email is a critical and frequently used communication tool for business and nonbusiness users alike. Furthermore, when it comes to converting customers and generating revenue for businesses, email blows away social media. According to Custora’s 2013 E-Commerce Customer Acquisition Snapshot (see Figure 9.1), organic search resulted in 16% of customer acquisition, while email accounted for roughly 7% of customer acquisition in Q2 2013. In contrast, social media channels resulted in less than 0.5% of customer acquisition. Additionally, email marketing shows the greatest growth in acquisition among all channels since 2010, whereas Facebook and Twitter have remained flat during the same period.
Figure 9.1 Growth of customer acquisition channels
Source: Custora’s E-Commerce Customer Acquisition Snapshot, Q2 2013
Social media also fails to stack up against email when considering customer lifetime value (CLV), or the net present value of expected future profits from a customer relationship. Facebook and Twitter acquisitions come in at 1% and -23%, relative to the average channel CLV. In contrast, customers acquired via email are worth 12% more than the average channel CLV (Custora 2013).
Messaging in Social Media Platforms
Direct “email-like” messages are present in social media platforms. However, the social networks create barriers to using one-to-one and one-to-many direct messages for advertising.
• Facebook allows only users that are “friends” to message one another.
• LinkedIn allows unconnected people to connect with one another using “In Mail”—however, this is a single, user-to-user connection that should be used with discretion. It cannot be used for a business-to-user connection.
• Until 2015, Twitter allowed only direct messages if both people followed each other. Also, although Twitter allows you to create lists of people, you cannot bulk message these users.
• Text messages allow for the same sort of direct communication as email, but the limited character count makes it impractical. In addition, some consumers pay for individual text messages, so your business’s advertising might be costing your customer. This practice is the equivalent of asking your customers to pay for the stamps for the postcards you mail them.
Social media messaging operates on the principle of both sides opting into a connection. And social media does not allow for the collection and creation of a list of users that can be bulk messaged like email.
What is a business to do? Social media requires businesses to think about how to entice users to connect with them—or opt-in—on social media by offering something of value. Even when a business successfully attracts followers to a social channel, it is never appropriate for the business to directly contact a follower through messages with an offer. This message would be quickly considered “spam” and generally a breach of social media etiquette. Such breaches of trust turn off customers rather than engage them.
So far, we have determined that email is used by more people, generates more revenue, and is more effective in reaching individual users. Social media offers direct messaging tools that resemble email, but these accounts cannot be gathered up to allow businesses to bulk message customers. Despite the continued and dominant effectiveness of email, it is obviously unwise to ignore social media channels in light of their impressive user growth rates.
Social Media and Email Are Fundamentally Different
Around 2010, marketing software companies and marketers anticipated a convergence between social media and email. Marketing automation and email platforms sought ways to add social media features into their applications and serve up reports of social media and email impacts in one unified dashboard. However, this convergence did not occur. In our experience with marketing groups at Fortune 500 companies, we did not see email marketing and social media marketing unify. Each channel was run by separate groups that often had little to no strategic overlap. Today, although social media and email may be closer in most organizations, they are recognized as unique and powerful in their own ways.
Let us take a look at how email and social media differ as communication channels. These differences require different styles of content and engagement models to be effective.
Direct Communication vs. Broadcast Communication
Email targets an individual with a specific offer. It is the replacement for a postcard direct mailer or a newsletter sent to a home or business. Email and postal mail work on the same philosophy: gather a list of addresses and segment this list to allow for messages to be customized, to be more relevant to different “types” of recipients. Email has advantages over postal mail in that:
• Email is cheaper—There is no printing and no postage.
• Email provides more data—The marketer can tell what has been opened and what actions have been taken.
• Email builds the list—The actions taken from an email can be used to enrich the database and refine future segments.
• Email is timely—An email can be drafted and sent to respond to immediate situations or opportunities based on events, weather, or user activity.
In contrast, social media is a broadcast communication—news, content, or events are posted online and show up in the feeds of the users that have followed your organization or business. For organic social media, there is no way to reach out and target single users en masse.
Private Communication vs. Public Communication
Email is—in today’s transparent world—relatively private in the sense that it is specifically targeted to a single person at their private account. (Of course, send something embarrassing, controversial or wrong, and an email may become very public when users post it on social media). In contrast, social media is public, broadcast communication. You post your business’s content on social media channels and it will be viewed by any member of the social network who visits your page or profile. Unlike email, social media offers no way to track and target which individuals have viewed your social content. In email, you can see exactly which individuals opened messages and clicked to take action. This data is used to refine future email targeting. No such one-to-one passive data collection exists on social media. In social media you can tell in the aggregate how many times a post was viewed, but not which individuals viewed it.
One-Way Communication vs. Two-Way Communication
For business promotions, email is a one-way communication between the business and the consumer. Businesses do not expect consumers to write back, in the same way that you would never think about writing back after receiving a brochure in the mail. Ideally, social media is a two-way communication. If a customer reaches out on social media to your business, the customer’s message and your business’s response are public. This reaching out could be an @message to a company, a mention, or a comment on Facebook.
In this example, Jason mentioned JetBlue in a tweet. The JetBlue social media team jumped right on the opportunity to engage and thank him for his business. Social media is allowing JetBlue to have a one-to-one interaction. It is not a sales pitch. They do not offer a credit card or try to sell him an upgrade. They simply thank him and let the conversation continue. JetBlue is using Twitter to build rapport. This channel and interaction was important, because 10 minutes later he had a customer service problem.
The social media team is doing a good job by responding quickly—less than 2 minutes—and apologizing for the delay. The next day Jason received a $25 credit in my email. Social media allowed JetBlue to build a one-to-one relationship, provide customer support, and offered an opportunity to follow and make right a service lapse.
Segmentation vs. Relationship
Bulk business-driven emails are found on a massive database of email addresses and attributes. As we presented in Chapter 6, with email, marketers often segment or divide the users based on different attributes. They then target different content to the relevant email addresses. Segmentation attributes might include the following:
• Demographics: age, gender, ethnicity, household income
• Product interest categories
• Interactions: opens, clicks, time of day
• Buying habits: time of month, average product
• Company relationship: loyalty member, coupon user
Through data analysis, a marketing team may identify segments of users based on combinations of attributes. Some example segments might include the following:
• Female, 25 to 35, mom, coupon user
• Male, 55to 65, sale purchase, retired, top 10% purchaser
Based on these segments, the marketing team generates email offers and sends them off to these customers. As users interact with these emails and make more purchases, more data is added to the database that can be used to refine future emails.
None of this data mining exists in organic social media. The ability to segment users and target a specific user is just not possible. Social media is broadcasting out a message to all of the customers that you are connected with. Some businesses pursue some very rudimentary segmentation by creating different social media channels. JetBlue offers a regular Twitter account and a Twitter account for special offers.
Notice, we said segmentation does not happen in organic social media. (Organic social media is social media that you have not paid for.) One of the things that make social media so compelling to marketers is the potential to use all of the personal information that social media users willingly provide to target advertising. Facebook becomes the database of personal information full of rich attributes—likes, dislikes, friends, hometown, workplace, college, year of graduation, favorite TV shows, music, products, relationship status—that marketers can use to show ads.
Opt-In and Opt-In
Yes, that is right—both social media and email need to be opt-in. To make these channels most effective (and to follow the law for email), you need to generate value for customers and let them choose to receive your content. This value could be something funny, informational, or an offer. For social media, this means getting customers to like or follow your company; in other words, you need to get a customer to want to receive your content in their feeds. For email, you need to get customers to willingly provide their email so that you may communicate with them directly through their inbox.
Email is a one-way communication that relies on past behaviors to establish relevance. Social media happens in real time. Companies can communicate directly with customers via social media and also engage them with offers. In our work, we have seen some clients look to use big data to mine social media for product interest—e.g., “I’m looking to buy a car” or “I’m planning a trip to Florida”—and then target messages via social media or email. Automating this process is not in reach for most businesses.
Planned vs. Immediate
In general, as we are thinking about email, it is planned. You take your email list, you segment it, you generate the segment list, you create offers for the segment, and you send the email to the list. Social media can be much more immediate. The now famous Oreo tweet from the 2013 SuperBowl is a great example. When the power went out during the game, Oreo’s social media team quickly whipped up this tweet:
This tweet connected with users because it was immediate and commenting on a broadly shared experience during a major cultural event. This tweet is just a quick, timely twist on an existing strategy. The Twitter strategy for Oreo features content about dunking. The real-time response leveraged an existing strategy, creative and brand message, and took the campaign to the next level.
Using Social Media to Build Your Email List
OK, social media and email are different and have different purposes. How can they work together?
A B2B business can use social media to promote thought-leadership. First, the business needs to build social media channels with potential customers as followers. Second, to effectively use this tactic, the business generates high-quality, customer-centered content that can be published at their website. It is critical that the content be educational, informative, and valuable to potential or current customers. In other words, the content should not be a press release, product sales sheet, or a direct offer. Social media can then be used to promote this content to followers. Each social media post should link back to the website. Once at the website, the business should provide an opportunity for the prospect to sign up to receive by email more valuable content (like the piece she is currently reading).
This social to email strategy will also work for a consumer package goods (CPG) company. If the company gains a strong social following, the CPG company can post out editorial content or offers such as coupons on social media. These links again should return followers to the website to read the content. The site should offer a call-to-action to sign up for a newsletter. For coupons, the coupons should offer a valuable carrot for customers to provide their email and to opt-in to future offers.
What Comes after Social Media? Proximity Marketing
At the start of this chapter, we made the statement that email is generally the most efficient and effective way to send a direct message to a customer. A new and potentially interesting variation on this theme is “proximity marketing.” This type of marketing allows businesses to push messages to your mobile device when you are within a certain perimeter by using Bluetooth through a beacon device. This technology allows companies to send a direct message to you simply because you have approached or entered a store or are traversing a specified location within the store (e.g., the jeans section). Based on your location you can receive a targeted message. At this point, this message is based solely on your proximity to a beacon device as well as the fact that you have mobile device with a receiving app. Examples of proximity marketing can be found in Apple retail stores as well as in stores of national chains such as Ann Taylor and Urban Outfitters.
Best Practices for Leveraging Content for Email and Social Media
When developing outbound-marketing content, many organizations think about the principle of COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere. This means creating one core piece of content and pushing it out across all of the different channels. What is important to note is that this is not write once, it is create once. Each piece is created once but it needs to be promoted (written) differently on different channels.
For example, if you create an article for your consulting business, you do not want to just tweet out the title or publish the entire article via email.
• Unique tweets and posts—Do not just use the title, “Read my new article on XYZ.” Rather, find something from the article that is shareable and valuable. Think of good tweets as good pull quotes from a magazine article.
• Use images—When posting on social media, using images can increase engagement with a message dramatically. According to a March 2014 study conducted by Socialbakers.com, over 75% of the content posted on Facebook was photography. Similarly, using an image on Twitter increases retweets by 35%. An image does not need to be a photograph—it can be a chart, graph, nicely typeset quote, or a photograph. Social media is a visual media and humans are adept visual processors. If you want engagement, it is difficult to beat images as a technique for drawing people into your content.
• Promoting content via email—When you promote your content via email do not email the entire article. You should write a good summary using bullet points and subheads. Pitch the article to your audience telling them why the content is valuable.
• YouTube—YouTube can be used in many different ways to promote content. For example, it is relatively easy to produce a short, 10-second video that teases a piece of content. This can be shared socially or added to a website or embedded in an email. It may also be worthwhile to produce a series of narrated slides that introduce the content. Note also that YouTube represents an opportunity for search engine optimization (SEO)—carefully consider the title and the description you give your video to maximize search engine impact.
• Slideshare—Take the key points from your article and put them into a slide deck and share it on www.slideshare.net. This will provide users another way to access your content, plus it will improve your SEO.
Exercise
• Select three organizations or businesses that you are receiving promotional email from already: try to select them from different categories. For example:
• A large company—Macy’s, Sports Authority, CVS
• A small business or single product company—perhaps a software package, airline, or travel company
• A professional service, thought-leader, or nonprofit—accounting, law firm, or content channel like MarketingProfs
• Follow these businesses on different social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter):
• Over a week, compare the content in email and social media messages.
○ How is the tone different?
○ Are the messages in email and social media coordinated?
○ How are they using images, graphics, or text?
○ Where does content from social media link to—the corporate website, microsite, or blog?
• Observe ways that they are trying to build their email list or gather additional personal information.
Reference
CUSTORA. E-Commerce Customer Acquisition Snapshot | Q2 2013
The Direct Marketing Association. (2013). “National client email report” (www.dma.org.uk/research/national-client-email-report-2013 accessed July 2015).
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1 http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/by-the-numbers-17-amazing-facebook-stats/