Written By:
James C. Wong, Co-Founder & General Partner of Empowered Ideas
In a world of highly integrated, yet segmented internet usage and behavior, today’s email marketers must be more in tune with their email contacts than ever before. This of course presents an all too real problem for most marketing teams, because email is a channel that has received much negative publicity in regards to spam.
However, email remains nonetheless, one of the most viable and critical communication channels for today’s marketing professional.
Why and How Has Email Remained So Popular?
With the advent of new communications technologies focused around social media interactions like Twitter and Facebook, many internet users have flocked to these various channels to receive and distribute bite-sized bits of information. The information exchanged is much more concentrated and distributed in snapshots, as compared to emailed content.
Regardless of which communication channels your contacts choose to utilize, one fact remains strong among all of those networks – they all require a valid email address to sign up.
Besides being a low-level security verification channel, email has become more than just a simple communication channel, but has matured into a hub that connects all of a person’s social media activities. Through email notifications, a user’s email inbox notifies the individual of Facebook message, comment, and friend requests. It notifies the individual of Twitter activity and requests, and replicates the same resource to hundreds of thousands of various online social networks and communities. Ultimately, all of that data gets redirected into an individual’s inbox. Not to mention the simple fact that you can’t send attachments via any other “social media” channel.
What Email Marketers Should Be Doing
Marketing professionals should be tapping into the wealth of data waiting just beyond their email lists. Each of their email contacts could potentially be a member of various online social networks, and in today’s inter-connected world, it’s vital that marketers discover to which networks and communities their members belong.
Using simple email surveys can reveal a flood of information about their contact’s behavior, interest and communications habits. Analyzing this data will identify key networks and communities that you should be targeting, and which networks you could be leveraging for your marketing efforts.
The key is that every social network and community has its own unique niche. Researching and understanding why your contacts are on certain networks over others will provide you with insight into their interests and behaviors, which may prove to impact their buying behaviors as well.
Email marketers should view email as a two-way communications channel, and start listening to their contacts. Marketers need to document and respond to feedback, and be as transparent as possible. Collecting contact behavior and network preference data will better prepare marketers to engage in meaningful and educated discussions with their contacts.
Hi James! I couldn’t agree more about the two-way communication aspect of e-mail. Can you imagine having a telephone and only using it to call out and never to take calls?
How do you propose a company “collect contact behavior and network data”?
Your analogy of having a one-way telephone reminds me of the days of AT&T long-distance marketing calls where all they could do was read from their pre-scripted dialogues. 🙂
Collecting contact behavior all depends on the exact type of behavior you’re looking to capture. There are numerous tools out there that allow you to track such analytics as page views, but if you’re looking to see where and what visitors are going and doing, you’ll have to find the perfect storm of tracking and analytics platforms.
Google Analytics is an obvious choice for site tracking, but if you want to get even more in-depth, consider Omniture, Woopra or Chartbeat for server-side analytics (and more).
Obviously, from the email side, you’d want to use a service like iContact to track the open rates and click-through-rates of your emails.
In regards to Social Media tracking, I am a huge fan of platforms like Radian 6, Trackur and Argyle Social.
As far as understanding the needs of your followers, clients and prospective clients, the best method would be to survey them. The information you collect about your product, services and online properties is probably the most valuable information you’d gather (and the most cost-effective too).