Social Media: Back to the Future

By Adam Proehl

Do you follow a brand on facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, or any other platform? Do you also suffer from information overload?

This week I had the pleasure of attending the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Summit (MIMA) in Minneapolis. I particularly enjoyed Gary Vaynerchuk‘s morning keynote. I’ve heard him speak before and he isn’t for everyone (if you are offended by foul language, you may want to sit out his presentations, but since I’ve been known to drop a few four letter words myself, it didn’t bother me).

As always, his morning keynote was lively, full of curses, references to the New York Jets (whom the Vikings are going to beat in a couple of weeks, BTW), and colorful anecdotes.  Even with all of that, what I was most impressed with was his vision and his intelligence as a thought leader in the interactive space.

There was one thing in particular he brought up that struck me is something I’ve been giving some thought to lately as well. He asked how many of us remember how good click thru rates on banner ads were in 1996.  He also asked how many of us remember email click thru and conversion rates from 1998. Well, I’m old enough that I remember both vividly.  The click thru & conversion rates on both of them were fantastic.

For banners, we could basically paste them across the networks and people would click on them. Better than that, people would actually buy. My business partner, Mike McAnally managed network banner campaigns for a $20 software product that basically helped them speed up their dial up internet and they were enormously successful. There was no targeting, retargeting, segmentation, or any of the things we take for granted today. We just plastered them all over.

Email was slightly different.  I’ve run email campaigns since 1997 and I think about how wildly successful text only “blasts” were then. All of our names were acquired thru proper methods and we never spammed anyone, but they were still just non-segmented blasts.  You can’t get away with that now and expect to last too long. The inbox is too cluttered and most emails will get deleted instantly if the message isn’t relevant.

Still with me?  That brings me to social media. As cool as it is, it still has some growing up to do, in my opinion. There are plenty of brands that I would be happy to “like” on Facebook (and I do “like” plenty of them) until I read their wall and see how often they post.  If I “liked” them, their posts alone would take up all my newsfeed space (especially when on a mobile device, which I often am).  So I haven’t “liked” them yet.

I’m on Foursquare, but really only so I can understand how it works. I have no interest in being mayor of my local McDonald’s.  This platform is still very young (honestly, at this point most of the people I know on it are fellow internet marketers) and it remains to be seen what becomes of it long term with Facebook now in the “check in” game.  One of the benefits to Foursquare is that if you “check in” to a place over a period of a relatively short period of time, you can become “mayor”.   Now, when you check in near a business that is active on Foursquare, you can be presented with a special offer to view. Starbucks is great at this, but I don’t like coffee, so it doesn’t do me much good.

Where I’m going with all this is that brands as well as social media platforms will eventually need to step up their game when it comes to a “like” or a “follow”.  Email is still very relevant (see my previous post below) when best practices are followed.  Put simply, you need to segment your customers and provide them with relevant offers in a manner which they prefer.  Banners still have a little way to go, but they’re getting better (although sometimes retargeting goes a little overboard to the point where it’s almost creepy – case in point I went to the Speedo site once to do some competitive research for an apparal client of ours and I couldn’t get away from them afterwards!).

For brands wanting to talk to consumers on social media platforms (which I’m all for, BTW), there’s going to need to be some technical as well as best practice solutions that present themselves. I’m not thinking of anything that’s rocket science – just best practices similar to what some of the best email marketers do. Specifically:

- What types of products are you interested in?

- What do you want to receive notifications on (news, specials, freebies, new products, etc)?

- How often do you want to receive messages from us?

- What format do you want them in (abbreviated or long post)? Some brand on facebook can put out some really long posts that take up a lot of screen space. I know plenty of people that find that annoying.

- Integrate it with email.

These are some of my thoughts. Thanks for reading. I welcome any questions or comments. Thanks.

Adam Proehl

adam@nordicclick.com

@adamproehl

Email: Not a Shiny, Sexy object, but Still Effective

By Adam Proehl

I’m sitting here at the airport in Indianapolis getting ready to board a plane home after a fantastic 3 day conference put on by Exact Target that included a keynote from Sir Richard Branson and a private concert by Train.  As awesome as those two events were (and believe, me, they were awesome), one of the things that stood out to me was that in most other conferences I attend email hasn’t retained the respect that it still deserves.

Poor email – it just isn’t sexy enough anymore. I’m a part of an industry where shiny new objects come and go on a daily basis so how can something so antiquated as email compete? I attend and speak at several conferences a year where social media experts poo-poo email as an outdated tool for communication and I just have to shake my head at that notion.

Let me ask you:

Have you checked your email today? Did you check it on your smartphone within 30 minutes of crawling out of bed this morning?  How many times have you checked your email today? How many times to you use your email address to login to a personal account (including all your social networks)?

I’ll wholeheartedly grant you that email “blasts” ala 1998 are very outdated. In fact, if anyone uses the words “email” and “blast” in the same sentence, I immediately correct them (FYI “email targeting” is a much better term). Anyone still sending email the same way they did 10 years ago should pause immediately and seek professional help.

I’ll have more a couple more posts with observations and comments in the coming week regarding this conference (OK, full disclosure I’m not including it all now because my notebook is in with the checked luggage and as you approach 40 like me you can’t remember everything unless you refer back to your notes. Be warned: it will happen to you, too.)

In the meantime, just a few high level takeaways and observations:

1)      True “integration” of networks and profiles on your customer lists will be key moving forward. Is there a brand that you a) subscribe to emails for, b) “like” on facebook, and c) follow on Twitter?  In an ideal world, how do you want this brand to communicate with you and with what frequency?

I don’t know about you, but I don’t necessarily want to get bombarded with an email, a post on my newsfeed, and endless tweets on the same afternoon from the same brand. You can make an argument for the effectiveness of “in your face” tactics, but I can also give you the same argument that you will quickly alienate your fans/followers/subscribers who already feel the pain of information overload.  We’re probably 2-3 years out from having the appropriate technical solutions avaible to solve this issue, but it will happen.

2)      Segment, Trigger, Recommend, Personalize; or “STRP”:  Four best practices of email marketing.

a.       Segment – Actually I need to repeat this multiple times: “Segment, segment, segment, segment”.  This might sound mean to say to a non-marketer, but not all customers are equal and thus they should not all be treated equally. It’s a free country, but the word “blast” should almost be outlawed when used in the same sentence as “email”.

b.      Trigger – Go through the heavy lifting of setting up rules based automated emails that will be set to trigger based on a defined event (purchase, cart abandonment, etc).  After programs like this are set up, they typically have an incredible shelf life.

c.       Recommend – If you’re segmenting your customers (and you are, right?) then that means you at least know something about them. Even if the segmentation rules are simple (i.e. buyers vs. non-buyers), you know enough to make some type of relevant recommendation to that subscriber. The key word here is – relevant.

d.      Personalize – I don’t mean just putting “Dear Joe” at the top of the email (although you should do that). I mean integrating and tying it in with a recommendation engine or some other type of system/process that shows me that you do indeed know me and are not wasting my time.  If I just bought a new 60 inch 3D capable flat-screen TV, then show me products that compliment it.  90% of all email that Best Buy sends out contains personalization (again, beyond just “Dear Joe”)

3)      Much like social media, you are not in control of your email program. Your subscriber is and you need to treat them well. More on that next week. Thanks for reading.  Any questions, comments, ugly remarks?  I’d love to hear them

Email: adam@nordicclick.com

Twitter: @adamproehl