The buzz around email marketing circles at the moment seems to be about how to ensure that a visitor to a social media site where your business is active (e.g. Facebook / You Tube to name just two) is added to your email program.

This sort of issue is really only a problem for larger businesses where there are different people looking after different communication channels to your client base. But it raises three interesting questions for any business:

1. Connecting through email with a visitor to a social media site sounds dangerous. Wouldn’t the visitor only want to be participating in the social media site? Why would they want to be added to your email list? Why isn’t business happy to just communicate solely in the social media site?

   The fact that businesses are talking about the issue of connecting in a meaningful ongoing way with visitors to social media sites demonstrates that there is a need for greater connection. However, you need to be very careful in communicating through email, that you don’t destroy the fledgling connection created by the social media. Your communications would have to be very soft sell, and very much about adding value and adding connection / relationship.

2. Is this just a problem in the area of social media or are there other touch points to your customers that are also not connecting to your email marketing efforts?

   I believe that this is an area of concern for all areas of business, which is why many businesses invest in CRM (customer relationship management) software to keep track of all their communications – from enquiry to purchase to invoice – with each customer. As an initial exercise in considering this problem, map out all the different ways that you communicate with your customers or potential customers, and think about how you could be promoting your email marketing initiatives in those other communications. Do you promote your email list on your invoices for example? (mental note: not yet implemented for eNudge)

3. Are the results of your email marketing efforts also being distributed back to the other areas of your business?

   Of course, it’s a two-way street.  When there are trends demonstrated through your email or sms marketing activities, they need to be fed back into the other marketing efforts of your business.  Of course, this assumes that you are paying attention to the trends.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 12:42 am and is filed under electronic marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.