Social email marketing, measurement and KPI’s: a follow-up

When I started this blog last Sunday I had been reading and discussing about the issues of the measurability of social email marketing. Yesterday I had an email conversation with the people at Radian6 (social listening and measurement company #1) and got some good input from Lauren Vargas.

I wanted and still want to make a post about everything we discussed but due to a lack of time I haven’t done it yet. Fortunately Lauren was so kind to comment on yesterday’s post about KPI’s and social email marketing.

I know that comments on blog posts are often not read so I just copy and paste some of the things Lauren had to say. Curious to know what you think.

“When using a tool like Radian6 to assist smonitoring a social e-marketing campaign, you would want to set up a topic profile to listen for specific keywords related to the email campaign and the sharable content attached to it. This would create a baseline of mentions prior to the launch. Then when the email campaign is launched it spreads the content out to the community that it hopefully is relevant to. If it is relevant then the community will start to share it in their various networks (tweeting it, blogging about it, commenting on the videos – if there were videos – etc). All of this activity in public social networks can then be tracked and measured to determine the level of buzz, level of engagement, commenting activity etc. against the baseline that was taken
prior to the campaign”.

She continues: “Also, part of the problem around poor social media lift is that many companies are probably still sharing promotional messages in their email campaigns as opposed to content relevant to people that are reaching out to. Very few people are willing to read let alone share promotional messages. However, if you have content that is worthy and the mechanisms are there to easily share it then I think companies will start to see the lift they would expect. I think the sticking point for many marketers is how to map the social conversation across all channels online and offline. The key is to integrate your social media efforts into traditional marketing and aligning with overall business goals. In measurement, you have to go beyond hits to know where and how people are engaging and then loop those conversations back to the individual and sales/decision making cycle. One way to do this is to integrate your email campaign response with legacy CRM systems. There is a lot of elbow grease and manual tracking involved to connect all the dots and properly measure to show return. I would also suggest overlaying the social conversation and keywords with your site interaction data. The Radian6 tool integrates with Webtrends data and this is a great start”.

More about this type of integration here.

Laura has more links and input in her comment and invites you to share your thoughts. The post and Laura’s comment can be found here.