Below is the Prezi presentation that we used to facilitate an eMarketing Roundtable for the Bay Area Marketing Association on November 10, 2011. The discussion started with a focus on why today's email marketing does a poor job emulating real-world human interaction, especially sales and marketing scenarios. Most of our time was focused on strategies and tactics for using social reinforcement in email marketing, including examples.
Hint: press the play button and make sure to view the Prezi in full-screen mode.
Questions and discussion that emerged from the other (primarily B2B) marketers in attendance:
- Social media sharing from our emails is hard to measure and doesn't seem to get results. How can we do better? This marketer was hoping to leverage social influence from their email marketing efforts, but found that social sharing links from their emails are: 1) not used very often, and 2) difficult to track their impact. This presentation addresses how to create social influence and pull within the context of your email.
- How do we publish dynamic images in our email? Refer to this article for some helpful tips.
- Does it work better to show the responses from other recipients before or after a recipient participates? Our results show that the social pull that's created by seeing other responses dramatically increases the odds that a recipient will engage. Unless you feel that seeing the results will skew your insights then you'll get the highest engagement rates by showing real-time participation at the moment the recipient opens your email.
- Do these strategies and tactics work better for B2C vs. B2B? In both B2B and B2C marketing there's a real person receiving your email. You need to understand that recipient's buying needs, timing, and potential value. Whether B2B or B2C it's important to engage the recipient in conversation in order to gain the insights you need to deliver the right offer at the right time.
- It's hard to know if the recipients will respond. What happens if you send an Interactive Email and no one responds? There's two methods to mitigate this risk: 1) Use your evangelists to send an initial seeding round, possibly even asking them personally to respond. By gaining social value from your seeders you'll increase the odds that your more challenging recipients will respond. 2) Keep the conversation private to your email recipients. If it goes well then publish the email publically and promote to your social networks. If not, then move on to the next campaign.
- My clients may be afraid of open-ended questions. They may not have any idea what the recipients will say. Is there anyway to safeguard against this? At GroupVine we advise our clients actively moderate the responses along with their social reinforcement activities.
Click here to see other email marketing examples incorporating social reinforcement and their results.
