E-mail Marketing’s Future in a Twitter World

ClickZ
Anna Maria Virzi

Here’s a hunch: Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks are forcing e-mail marketers to change their ways – and consumers and businesses stand to benefit.

At the Email Evolution Conference (EEC) in Miami, e-mail marketers explained how they are striving to improve campaign performance, from pruning e-mail subscriber lists to reevaluating success goals and the metrics they track.

Motivating the marketers? They want to improve return on investment, adhere to best practices, and ostensibly avoid the unemployment line. It’s no coincidence this push comes as people spend more time on social networks connecting with friends, family, and others.

Here are three ways that social media is changing e-mail marketing:

E-mail Will Play Nice With Social

E-mail complements social media in referral campaigns and incentive-based promotions to acquire new customers, say e-mail marketing practitioners.

Consider these examples, including the first two that were discussed during the Email Evolution Conference :

•Mint.com acquired 8,000 users from one social e-mail referral program at a 50 cent CPA, said Kristin Hersant, StrongMail’s director of corporate marketing. In that campaign, Mint.com tested three messages with customers; customers were all asked to enlist three friends to sign up but the rewards varied. Some customers were offered the chance to win an iPod Nano; some were given “exclusive access” to Mint.com’s beta testing program; and participants in a control group didn’t receive an incentive. Of those that received the “exclusive access” offer, 48 percent opened the e-mail and shared the invitation, on average, with five friends each. Those invitations had a 61 percent click-through rate. Every 2.6 clicks on the invitation led to one friend becoming a Mint.com user.

•Souplantation and Sweet Tomatoes, a 112-restaurant chain, averages about 40,000 new e-mail subscribers a month thanks to its e-mail and social initiatives, said Pilar Bower, optimization and e-mail strategist at Red Door Interactive. In January, Souplantation and Red Door worked with BlueHornet, an e-mail service provider, to manage a campaign that encouraged subscribers to refer a friend to sign up for the restaurant’s “Club Veg” e-mail. Of 70,000 new subscribers last month, 17,000 were attributed to the refer-a-friend campaign.

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