5 Lessons For Email and Social Integration

We know that email subscribers, and now social media followers, are so valuable since they've given permission to receive communications. The problem is that vanilla flavoured, promotional messaging en masse will fail - the different audiences in those channels most likely have different information needs.

I read an interesting case study that's similar to another project I have been working on. It's a US business effectively combining email and social tactics creating 120% increases in traffic - and to the right web pages. I thought I'd share the summary here.

The good news - this case study is not a mega brand like Starbucks or Oreo, so it's a bit more real, the company is a much smaller cookware and cake decorating business called Wilton, an established business of 80 years, one that has grown adept at push marketing via email . The business had two realisations (I hope more companies have these):

• Consumers are already interacting with each other around the subject matter, Wilton's were not a part of that conversation but recognized they should and could be
• It was no longer sufficient to push out content and try to control the flow of communication

So what did they do?

1. They assumed nothing and sought to understand how email subscribers, Facebook fans and Twitter followers related to one another - what were their behaviours in each channel and the extent of cross-over. You can use tools like Flowtown to aid this to some extent, but Wilton's chose direct survey's that asked the questions to email subscribers and social media fans and followers. As an example, Wilton found that 50% of their combined Facebook fans and Twitter followers were also email subscribers, much lower than they expected.
2. Develop an intimate understanding of why those subscribers, fans and followers choose to connect. Why are people using those communication tools to connect with your brand? Through further questioning, Wilton released that email subscribers were more heavily engaged with the brand and were expecting "how to" content (I stress the words 'expecting' and 'content'), in their case this is baking and party ideas for mums. The reason is that the email subscribers are typically existing consumers of the product already. The social media fans and followers are less committed and far less likely to have purchased, they're interested in offers and announcements that are product focussed - they want reasons to buy.
3. Wilton's sought to grow social and email tactics by cross promotion, this gave the brand more opportunities to communicate and 'touch' the consumer. Given that the overlap between the subscribers, fans and followers was deemed low, they simply promoted the other channels wherever possible and provided the reason 'why'.
4. Co-ordinate for multi-channel promotions. Wilton's have an annual centre-piece for marketing, a yearbook for ideas, recipe's and tips. With a traditional, launch email campaign at the centre, Wilton's now also promotes content previews via Twitter about the launch and product ideas, and uses Facebook as the means for interaction and Q&A, encouraging dialogue and ideas sharing.
5. Campaign development and timing. Wilton's stagger the content publishing and promotion across both email and social as part of campaign execution, so for example Halloween relied on their blog, You Tube and Facebook for sharing useful "how to'" videos detailed in a section in the book, Twitter was used to illustrate product applications for Halloween recipes and tips, and email tied it all together.

120% increase in traffic, why did it work? Erwin, Wilton's head of marketing, claims the reason it worked is simply because people have so much more content choice, they want relevant information when they need it - the opportunity is that you have thought about both those things and reference your product at the right moment, as part of the solution.

The case study, along with 5 others worth reading, are here on Marketing Sherpa's web site.