SOCIAL MEDIA GUIDE FOR EMAIL MARKETERS

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The Relationship Between Social Media and Email Marketing . . . . . . . . . . 2
Better Together: Social Email . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Who Owns Social? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 To Sell or Not to Sell via Social Media? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Social Media is a Cocktail Party . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Direct Sales Via Email, Indirect Sales Via Social . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Maximizing the Reach of Your Socially Engaged Subscribers . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Identify, Target, and Engage Your Socially Active Email Subscribers . . . . . . 5 Include Social Endorsements in Email Messages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

What Social Networks Matter Most to Email Marketers? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Start with Existing Subscribers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Look at Acquisition Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Take Your Social Team to Lunch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Social Email Campaign Ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Grab the Low-Hanging Fruit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Develop a Social Email Acquisition Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Distribute Socially Share-Worthy Email Campaigns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Cross-Pollinate and Re-Purpose Content & Campaigns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Optimize Subject Lines, Hero Shots, and Offers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Launch a Brand Advocate Reward Campaign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Integrate Social Endorsements into Promotional & Transactional Messages . . 12

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Whitepaper: Social Media Guide for Email Marketers |

Page 2

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Todays digital marketer has access to more delivery channels than ever before. As the number of options for reaching customers and prospects increases, questions arise: Which channels do you to use when, with whom, and at what time? Organizations are creating new areas of ownership for these emerging channelsones that may live within and outside of marketing departments. And too often, as a result, channel owners lack the time or the resources to collaborate, align activities, or establish shared goals. This whitepaper is written by BlueHornet for email and digital marketers. Its purpose is to provide clarity about the symbiotic relationship between two of todays most important digital marketing channelssocial media and email. The document highlights: The unique characteristics of each channel How to determine which social media channels matter most to email marketers Ways to bridge the who owns social? gap Ways social media and email marketing can be used together The paper also offers ideas for effective, integrated social email campaigns, providing options that range from must-have components to more complex, data-centric programs. There are many different aspects of social media management. While some of these, like social listening and community management, may be less relevant to the email marketer, the majority, including social sharing, acquisition, and engagement, offer a wealth of opportunities and rich sources of data that email marketers can use to drive immediate and long-term program improvement.

2013 BlueHornet Networks, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of Digital River, Inc. | BlueHornet.com

Page 1

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOCIAL MEDIA AND EMAIL MARKETING

On its own, social media marketing offers companies many unique and highly effective ways to build brand awareness, monitor consumer sentiment, and create an engaged community. Here are some characteristics of social media marketing: By nature, social networking sites are designed to keep community members within the walls of their network. Most social media marketing efforts start and stay there. Social media communications can be scheduled in advance for larger audience segments. But due to the speed with which conversations evolve, posts will seem off-topic or impersonal if not well integrated into the messaging stream. Good community managers can build brand loyalty quickly by engaging individually with fans and followers; however, due to staffing constraints, personal outreach is commonly reserved for the most vocal members of a social networkthose who are very happy or very unhappy. Most brand fans arent looking to be sold to directly when theyre engaged in social networking activity. For those one-to-one conversations that do take place between brands and followers, it is very difficult to collect data from the engagements that can be used for targeting or building richer customer profiles. By itself, email marketing also offers unique and effective ways to connect with customers and prospectsways that are quite distinct from social media marketing: Email can drive subscribers anywhere on the webincluding to social networksand the action can happen right after an email is deployed. Discounts are the number one reason consumers sign up for email programs. They want and expect to be sold to via this channel. Thanks to robust data management and targeting capabilities, even pre-scheduled and fullyautomated email messages can be highly personalized to individual profiles and preferences.

Better Together: Social Email

Looked at individually, social and email have different strengths and applications. Social primarily broadcasts to a defined ecosystem in a publicly consumable way. Email is a more private method of communicating with customers, and it allows you to use customer data for targeting; each engagement enriches customer profiles for better targeting and relevance next time around. Collectively, the two channels align in their ability to extend reach and inform. We call this collective strategic use of social media and email marketing social email. Neither email nor social marketing campaigns alone will likely provide the comprehensive view of and engagement with your customers that an effective social email program can achieve. But through their combined use, email marketers can accomplish several critical digital marketing tasks: increase e-mail relevance; improve targeting effectiveness; enhance social media engagement; and drive online sales. Best of all, this can be done in ways that create positive customer experiences across both channels.

Whitepaper: Social Media Guide for Email Marketers |

Page 2

WHO OWNS SOCIAL?

Many email marketers, taxed with enough to do as it relates to email alone, dont take the time to fully assess the potential of social email because they dont manage their companys social media program they dont own social. However, as social media mainstreams its way into how we engage personally and professionally, asking the question, Who owns social? becomes something akin to asking Who owns Microsoft Word? or Who owns LinkedIn? Each are tools that most of us use to communicate, albeit in different ways and at different times. We all own them. Once we become more comfortable looking at social media as a communication tool, the question becomes less about ownership and more about a) identifying ways multiple groups within an organization can use social media to reach a shared set of goals, and b) coordinating these communication efforts for maximum effectiveness. Without questionand regardless of current organizational structuresevery email marketer can improve the value of their program by making the decision to own the ways social and email can work together.

TO SELL OR NOT TO SELL VIA SOCIAL MEDIA?

Consumers have strong feelings about how and when they want marketers to provide them with offers. The good news is that your customers do want you to sell to themespecially if you can provide them special deals or privilegesbut it is important to remember that they want to make the rules about when and where that communication takes place. When consumers are on social sites, theyre primarily engaging with others personally or professionally. They engage with brands too, but the reasons for those engagements are most often because theyre fans of a product that they already own or because theyre educating themselves about a product or service that they may wish to purchase.

Social Media is a Cocktail Party

For a while now, an analogy has circulated in digital marketing circles that compares social media to a cocktail partyyoure there to network, not to sell. The distinction is subtle, but important. Brands need to inform and engage followers about their offerings, and nobodys going to complain about an occasional special offer, especially when its exclusive to them and their network. But your social media followers do not want to get bombarded with hard sell messages when theyre more interested in status updates from their friends.

2013 BlueHornet Networks, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of Digital River, Inc. | BlueHornet.com

Page 3

Direct Sales Via Email, Indirect Sales Via Social

On the other hand, when it comes to email marketing, consumer sentiment is crystal clear. They want to be sold to via email. In fact, in BlueHornets 2013 Consumer Views of Email Marketing survey of 1,000 men and women across the U.S., the number one reason given for subscribing to email programs is to receive discounts and offers.

Which of the following is your most important reason for signing up to receive emails from companies seeking your business?
72.6%
To receive discounts

83.5% 9.1% 6.4% 8.2%

To get product/ services updates

Consumers love to get discounts via email.

If I love the brand

7.0% 10.0% 3.1%

0 20 40 60 80

2012 2013
100

To participate in product research

Source: BlueHornets 2013 Consumer Views of Email Marketing; n=1,001.

Considering the widely differing consumer views on where they prefer to get online offers, email marketers have the greatest opportunity to drive direct sales via the email channel. But, email marketers can help drive higher customer lifetime value with their brands socially engaged subscribers, too. This is done most effectively by identifying subscribers who have the greatest reach socially, and targeting and remarketing to those subscribers based on their social sharing activity. Why focus here? The idea is to let your subscribers sell socially on your brands behalf. All it takes is a single tweet, one I just bought this post on Facebook, or something similar. If that one subscriber has hundreds of engaged followers, your offers reach has expanded exponentially.

Whitepaper: Social Media Guide for Email Marketers |

Page 4

MAXIMIZING THE REACH OF YOUR SOCIALLY ENGAGED SUBSCRIBERS

Your social media team is likely focused primarily on building out your brands social media presence. But as an email marketer, you have a valuable opportunity to capitalize on the social media presence of your email subscribers. Whats the difference? Considering the exponential reach that can be gained by tapping your fans network of followers, it can be significant. A strong brand presence on social sites is important, but it is the fan network that powers real success. Case in point: Lillian Sue reports that for each Share, Zappos earns $33.66 on Twitter, $2.08 on Facebook, and $0.75 on Pinterest in incremental revenue. And as Sue notes, facilitating the social endorsement doesnt rely on Zapposs social media presence, but rather on the social media presence of their customers. Here are some ways email marketers can extend reach and drive incremental revenue by leveraging the presence of their socially engaged email subscribers:

Identify, Target, and Engage Your Socially Active Email Subscribers

When you acquire new subscribers via social media, the opportunity exists to capture rich quantities of their social data within your email marketing database. This data allows you to identify your socially active email subscribers and target them. If youre looking for maximum impact, focus targeting efforts on subscribers who have the largest following of fans who meet you brands audience profile.

Include Social Endorsements in Email Messages

Including social endorsements and commentary in your email messages can be a highly strategic move. You already know that consumers value peer reviews and comments, so inserting reviews from social media sites provide that value. Whats more, you can use the commentary inserted in your email as an opportunity to provide exposure and lend credibility to your most engaged subscriber fans and followers. In turn, this helps them further expand their network and creates additional goodwill between you and your influential subscribers.

Did You Know? 72% of people trust social endorsements, even from complete strangers.
(Source: Search Engine Joural)

2013 BlueHornet Networks, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of Digital River, Inc. | BlueHornet.com

Page 5

WHAT SOCIAL NETWORKS MATTER MOST TO EMAIL MARKETERS?

The social networks where users spend the most time are Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Pinterest and Instagram are growing rapidly and becoming increasingly important, especially for retail and other B2C brands. At the end of the day, the social networks that matter most to email marketers are the social networks that matter most to their customers.

Start with Existing Subscribers

How do you know which ones these are? Start by taking a look at your existing subscriber base. Track and identify which networks they are sharing your email content on today. Then look at those networks to confirm that theyre a good fit for your brand presence.

Look at Acquisition Sources

Acquisition source is another key metric for determining which social networks should be a higher priority for email marketers. In addition to tracking which social networks subscribers share your email content to most frequently, look at which social networks garner the most emails subscription sign ups.

Take Your Social Team to Lunch

And if your company has a dedicated social media team, take them out to lunch. Find out where their efforts are focused and why. Get a sense of whats different in terms of interests and approaches across your brands various social sites.

Whitepaper: Social Media Guide for Email Marketers |

Page 6

SOCIAL EMAIL CAMPAIGN IDEAS

Grab the Low-Hanging Fruit
Here are the three entry-level social email components that every marketer should consider as part of a crawl-walk-run strategy:

1. Include Social Network Icons in Emails

Maximize the reach of your email campaigns by adding social network icons in the email footer or header. Adding Follow us or Join Us text along with the list of social network options provides an ongoing reminder that youre a socially relevant brand and are willing to engage with your subscribers on their terms and on their turf.

2. Promote Your Social Venues to Your Email Subscribers

Invite email subscribers to join your social community. Provide a prominent call to action in the email campaign and give subscribers good reasons to check out your social pages, feeds, channels, blogs, and boards. Provide your subscribers with compelling social content to help them become fans and get involved socially.

3. Invite Subscribers to Participate in Discussions on Social Sites

Email marketing is traditionally a one-way communication vehicle, but social email gives you the ability to invite subscribers to ask questions and continue the discussion on your social networks. Ensure your social team is prepared to actively respond to increased engagement and traffic.

Develop a Social Email Acquisition Program

Customers look forward to receiving offers via email and prefer social media for sharing and staying updated on their network; so its important that marketers ensure fans and followers can join the companys email program, too. A good way to do this is by offering an email sign up form right on your Facebook page. And a better way is to create a two- or three-step social email campaign around acquiring these new subscribers:

Step One: Incent

In addition to offering the sign up form, provide lots of good reasons why fans and followers should want your emails. The most effective programs offer a sign-up value proposition that is different from web or in-store sign ups, tailoring each slightly for the social channel the new subscribers will come from.

Step Two: Delight

Send a welcome letter that is triggered immediately at sign up, and make sure each welcome letter is tailored to the social network the subscriber came from. Thank the new social subscriber for joining and reward them with an offer, badge, or other relevant incentive.

Step Three: Get to Know Your New Subscribers

When social fans join your email program, you may be able to gain access to certain profile data. Make sure that your acquisition program captures that data and passes it to your email marketing solution for targeting and segmentation. Look at whether your social acquisition campaign would benefit from an additional email to complete the new subscribers onboarding. If it does, use this opportunity to tailor content to what you know about the fan based on relevant profile data. If the acquisition campaign doesnt warrant another email, make sure youre using profile data to place the subscriber in the right email campaigns moving forward.

2013 BlueHornet Networks, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of Digital River, Inc. | BlueHornet.com

Page 7

Distribute Socially Share-Worthy Email Campaigns

When subscribers share entire emails, or select portions of content, with their social community they are extending the reach of your email program and providing a valuable endorsement for your brand. Providing share to social opportunities in email is a proven strategy for boosting brand awareness, building word of mouth creditability and driving referral traffic back to point of sale. However, the critical component for these types of campaigns is the email contentregardless of the user experience, sharing success hinges almost completely on the value or novelty of the content. If the content isnt shareworthy, dont expect it to be passed along.

Sharing Entire Emails

Heres one of our favorite examples of an email that social media enthusiasts deemed highly shareworthy in its simple-yet-attentiongetting entirety. In this case, KFC relied solely on email to drive social engagement around the launch of their new sandwichand they got it. Results from this social email campaign included: 40% open rate 29% increase in traffic to KFC.com 3 million additional impressions 12,000 shares on Facebook & Twitter in 24 hours 30% increase in email opt-ins

Sharing Portions of an Email

It is also possible to design emails so that socially engaged email recipients can pick a single portion of the email to pass along to their networks. This approach may improve share rates by giving the subscriber the ability to limit shared content to the items they care most about.

Sharing a specific piece of content from an email rather than the entire campaign is great when the email contains many articles or products.

Whitepaper: Social Media Guide for Email Marketers |

Page 8

Cross-Pollinate and Re-Purpose Content & Campaigns

Nobody knows as well as email marketers about the amount of time and effort it takes to create email newsletters and promotional campaigns. Can you repurpose that email content for your social media channels? It depends. Sometimes, the restrictions of the social network will require you to make modifications. Unless your email campaign comprises text messages that are 140 characters or fewer, for example, emails wont translate directly to tweets. The guiding factor is whether or not your email campaign is relevant to the conversations taking place on your social sites right now. Its good idea to align your brands social postings with your email communications plan. For businesses that work this way, its usually possible to repurpose campaign content across multiple channels. Keep in mind, however, that while continuously broadcasting the same messages via email and social postings may increase the likelihood of getting visibility into a key campaign, you are creating risk of redundancy. Two things can help you cross-pollinate your content and campaigns across channelseffectively repurposing without being redundant:

1. Tailor the Message to the Medium

Tailor campaign content to the channel. Chilis restaurant sent an email and tweeted about a free desert/app promotion. The email subject line was Free App? Free Desert? You Choose! The tweet was Celebrate Saturday with Free App or Dessert! And both campaigns drove traffic to a poll on Facebook, where all visitors could get a coupon for the freebie of their choice.

2. Send Your Messages to the Right Audience Segments

It is important to know which social channels your email subscribers are active on and which channels they were acquired from, when relevant. So if your brand is launching a huge Facebook campaign, you may choose to identify your active Facebook subscribers and suppress them from the email portion of this campaign. While this recommendation may seem counterintuitive, it could be highly strategic if your Facebook campaign is so intensive that sending the same messages to Facebook subscribers would be overkill. It could also work well if your goal is to increase Facebook activity among your inactive email subscribers.

3. Add Your Brands Popular YouTube Videos to Your Emails

Leading email service providers should offer you the ability to add video viewing capabilities to your emails. The main reason most brands dont do more video email is that they lack assets for campaigns. If you have an active YouTube channel, consider cross-pollinating some those video assets to increase email message engagement.

2013 BlueHornet Networks, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of Digital River, Inc. | BlueHornet.com

Page 9

Optimize Subject Lines, Hero Shots and Offers

Social media thought leader and email industry veteran Jay Baer is a vocal advocate for coordination between social and email departments. In fact, Baer argues that the same people who handle email marketing within organizations should also own social. Another Baer recommendation is to use email and Facebook for image and content testing. Here are some ideas:

Conduct Email Subject Line Testing For Social Site Headlines & Tweets

Theres no easy way to A/B test Facebook headlines, Pinterest captions, or tweets. But thats OK. Email is a testing powerhouse, so use it to try out subject lines and learn what pulls the best response. Use the test winner for your next Facebook headline, tweet, etc. One point to note when it comes to YouTube video titles and descriptions, search is kingplugging an effective email subject line into a YouTube video description may not drive the results that youd see from creating the title based on keyword research.

Let Facebook Likes Inform Email Hero Shot Decisions

Wondering what your next email hero shot should be? Take a look at the most popular images on your Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest pages for inspiration. Of course, these have to be contextually relevant to your messaging, but think about how you can use your social communities for insight into things your larger target audience may care about. If the passion is particularly high, you may even consider modifying your overall campaign strategy to take advantage of response trends.

Float High-Response Email Offers across Social

Weve already discussed the question of direct selling on social sites. Generally speaking, customers dont turn to social when theyre looking to buy, unless its for a recommendation or review. However, if one of your email offers is off-the-charts successful, that means that your customers find it valuable. You could encourage your subscribers to share the offer (and if its indeed that valuable, they likely will). You may also consider putting it on your own social sites as an opportunity to extend reach and to share value with a larger portion of your target market.

Whitepaper: Social Media Guide for Email Marketers |

Page 10

Launch a Brand Advocate Reward Campaign

By definition, social brand advocates are well positioned to promote their favorite products and companies. But social media brand advocacy doesnt always happen organically, and if it does, it doesnt happen overnight. Fortunately, email marketers are equipped with the data it takes to identify and target their most influential customers. And they have at their fingertips an email marketing platform that can speed that message to thousands of brand advocates in a very short timeframe.

1. Define the Target Audience

Heres a sample of the criteria you can use to identify brand advocates in your email program: Query your email database for all subscribers who have socially shared an email at least twice in the last 45 days and have a top-tier customer lifetime value.

2. Create the Brand Advocate Segment

Subscribers who meet the example criteria above, or the criteria that best meets your requirements, are your brand advocate segment.

3. Engage & Reward

Once the target audience is defined and segmented, send an email to your subscribers asking for their input on a key question, such as an offer. For example, Do you prefer free shipping, a percentage off your order, or a flat savings rate? Drive them to Facebook or Twitter to respond. Then send another email with a special dealmaybe one that combines free shipping and a percentage off their next purchase! These socially engaged subscribers are likely to pay close attention to your emails moving forward. And youll get their valuable engagement on your brands social site, too.

2013 BlueHornet Networks, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of Digital River, Inc. | BlueHornet.com

Page 11

Integrate Social Endorsements into Promotional & Transactional Messages

Weve discussed the value of social media endorsements in promotional emails as a way to capitalize on the exponential reach offered by your most socially engaged subscribers. Endorsements in promotional emails can also increase conversion rates and incremental purchasing. So why stop there? Integrate positive dialogues and endorsements that are taking place on social channels in your transactional messages too. Here are two types of transactional messages to consider:

Purchase Confirmation Emails

You can use social endorsements in purchase confirmation emails in multiple ways. They can cross-sell when coupled with next logical purchase recommendations. Or, they can simply be a way to make your customers feel good about the purchases they make. In this scenario, the social endorsement should be for the product that was just purchased.

Cart Abandonment Emails

When carts get abandoned, it is important to think about effective ways to get the customer back into buying modediscounts arent the only way to do that. Email marketers have a valuable opportunity to provide testimonials or customer ratings and reviews that will help validate the customers buying decision and encourage a transaction. These endorsements can come from the brands social sites. Heres a sample user experience:

Whitepaper: Social Media Guide for Email Marketers |

Page 12

CONCLUSION
By effectively combining the best of email and social programs, social email creates rich opportunities for cross-channel marketing that can drive acquisition, engagement, advocacy, and ultimately higher customer lifetime value. Regardless of the resources available or the maturity of a brands social programs, the key is integrating these two powerful marketing channels to create fans and advocates out of email subscribers, while rewarding brand followers for becoming a part of your email program.

2013 BlueHornet Networks, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of Digital River, Inc. | BlueHornet.com

Page 13