Email Marketers Should Own Social

Email marketers should own Social Media!

If you’re an email marketer and you’re not making social marketing part of your toolset and service offering, you’re making a big mistake.  They are really not that different, although social (in my opinion) has a higher man-hour need than email.

Social media marketing is not unlike email marketing.  We share many of the same strategies:

• You need to build an interested base of fans/subscribers.
• You need to interact with those fans/subscribers.
• You need to publish quality, targeted, relevant content to your fans/subscribers.
• You build your fan/subscriber base though natural and incentive-based growth tactics.
• You need to show the ROI for the marketing dollars spent – those who say social isn’t about the ROI are dreaming.  Eventually the C-suite will want numbers that aren’t a guess.
• You need to identify the uber-fans/subscribers and reward them.
• Both can (and should) be an avenue for customer service.
• Both can (and should) drive traffic to your website/ecommerce/blog.
• Both can help and hurt your reputation, though Social in a more public way.
• Both can (and should) increase revenues. (Again, social tracking for revenues can be a little tricky.)
• Both can (and should) start conversations and keep them going.

There is no denying that budgets for Social are growing each year. Yet they are for email, too.  While social marketing may mean spending time and resources to get up to speed with the social world, it will be time and money well spent.

Many marketing managers have little or no experience when choosing a social marketing company.  And have you ever talked to some of the so called “Social Media Expert?”  Everything is bunnies and kittens and it’s all about just getting out there and adding buttons to your website – WooHoo!

It’s more than that—Much more.

(Note: I’m not talking about REAL social media marketers—those that “get it.” But the majority falls into this bucket. Again not unlike email back in the late 90s early 2000s when a bunch of “Email Experts” came out of the woodwork. I look forward to your cards and letters.)

While there are a plethora of “Social Media Experts” out there who have no idea what it takes to run a successful marketing campaign and tie it all together with analytic data and ROI metrics, for us email marketers, it’s what we do every hour of every day.

Social now is not unlike email was 10-15 years ago: blasting worked for a while, but the subscribers eventually rebelled for something better.  Social needs the experience and knowledge email marketers have developed through many years of success and, yes, failures.  The audience is still king and while social maybe the new darling on the block, it’s still in need of a seasoned hand at the helm. Email marketers were social before social was cool.

Social and email marketing are already married; shouldn’t we take Social on the honeymoon and get a little?

Cheers, Chris


P.S. Mobile should be in your toolset as well, but that’s for another post.


- Christopher Donald
VP of Marketing
Inbox Group (an eec Silver Sponsor)
@inboxgroup

Source: http://blog.emailexperience.org/blog/contributors-to-the-eec-blog/email-marketers-should-own-social

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