The recent Econsultancy’s 2010 Email Marketing Census revealed that companies continue to utilize email marketing more than PPC, but they are not taking advantage of one of the most important benefits of email marketing – segmentation. Furthermore, what does email segmentation mean for the web 2.0 customers?
Ecommerce marketers can power up their email with social intelligence that not only helps drive sales, but also captures the next sale and the sale after that. A social media monitoring tool offers quick and easy methods to identify SEO keywords and geo-location segmentation for your email campaigns.
Email marketing has long been a superior channel for driving sales, specifically in remarketing campaigns. When you email your subscribers, you already know a little about their buying behavior. By tailoring a highly personalized message that aligns with their current conversations, your email campaigns will generate a significantly higher response rate than generic, broadcast-style emails.
Marketers’ new obsession with geo-location has spurred a new content dynamic that can be factored into email campaigns. With the popularity of Foursquare and other geo-tracking web applications, customers are sharing the exact location of their purchasing choices in online conversations. It’s not just about the McCafe, but customer social conversations now include the McCafe at the McDonalds in Chicago at the intersection of LaSalle and Ontario.
From Alterian’s Social Media Monitoring ROI whitepaper on search marketing, here is a step-by-step process for using a social media monitoring tool to identify key words and phrases that can be used to optimize personalized messaging and geo-targeting content. The following example is based on searches set up for: ‘McCafe’, ‘Starbucks’ and ‘iced coffee.’
Social Media Monitoring Tool Search Set Up:
- Set up searches for your brand, industry terms and competitors.
- Create Theme word clouds for each. A word cloud is the result of analyzing all the conversations.
Customer’s SEO Content:
Above is the Theme graph for the search results for ‘McCafe.’ This graph is generated by making the words that are used most frequently the largest. To optimize your email content for McCafe, marketers should include keywords such as: free, coffee, win and sweepstakes.
Customer’s Geo-Location Content:
After you have your Theme graph, the Map Overlay option will drill down on where these conversations are occurring. In the below map, most of the conversations in regard to ‘McCafe’ are occurring in Germany. McCafe marketers may want to direct their email campaigns to take advantage of this spike in conversation activity in Germany. You can also review the geo-locations of your competitor’s conversations which can identify new email marketing campaign opportunities.
Email is available everywhere, on every computing platform, and is an open platform, which gives it the broadest reach and access to customers and prospects. By combining it with social media components, sophisticated marketers increase the effectiveness of their campaigns.
A social media monitoring tool offers a multitude of opportunities to maximize your email marketing ROI in a fraction of the time. For more information on Alterian SM2, social media monitoring tool, please visit – www.alterian.com. Ivan Chalif is a director of product marketing at Alterian and can also be found at Twitter and LinkedIn.
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