Email marketing, twitter and the social revolution
Monday, June 22nd, 2009 by patricia
Ross loves twittering. You can see that he is in “Twitter” mood when his eyes light up and he has a smile on his face like a child on Christmas day. And everybody knows, he is going to enchant the world and his faithful followers with some wisdom about his passion- branding - or just something interesting that happened in his life. Personally, I already feel over challenged keeping my private Facebook account up to date and I don’t even want to talk about my LinkedIn profile. However. (you could see it coming, this “however”…) As responsible for e-marketing I have become a bit of an evangelist for social as well as business networks as a fantastic marketing tool. “Viral Marketing” is the magic word, which means nothing more than “word-of-mouth”. Basically, let others do your marketing for you. Spread the word, pass it on to your followers who pass it on to theirs who pass it on to theirs… and before you know, your audience has gone from 20 to 8000. No costs involved. How much better can it get?
What does this have to do with email marketing? An e-newsletter can be the ideal place to drive people to your networks and to get the ball rolling. You add a little icon to your newsletter (can be Twitter, can be Facebook or LinkedIn or all of them – whichever suits your business best) and place it strategically so that people can easily find and click on it. If only 5 people click on your profile and decide to follow you (I keep to the Twitter example) and each of them have 20 followers themselves – imagine how easily you’ve enhanced your potential target audience. Or why not create a group, start a discussion and kick it off in your newsletter? The options are endless…
Whenever we start a new email marketing strategy for a new client we strongly recommend to set up a company (not your private!) profile on at least the most commonly known networks and to promote them in the actual newsletter. It doesn’t hurt but does increase your chances of being heard and builds a deeper more engaging relationship with your audience. And if you are like me a bit scared of regular updates, here’s a nice tip: http://ping.fm/ Sign up for free, send your update to them – and it gets automatically published on all networks you have registered with them.
