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Will Social Networking Replace Email?

Is email about to go the way of the dodo bird? Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg thinks so. When she spoke at Nielsen’s Consumer 360 conference earlier this week, she told the audience, “If you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow, you look at what teenagers are doing today…E-mail–I can’t imagine life without it–is probably going away.” (via FastCompany).

That’s a bold statement. For support, she turned to a Pew Study that looked at the communication habits of teenagers and found that only 11% of them used email daily. Teens are much more likely to use text messaging, instant messaging, social networking sites and even the telephone to communicate with others.

But does that mean that social networking will replace email anytime soon? My Magic 8-Ball says “Outlook not so good.” The results of a recent study by ExactTarget and CoTweet indicate that email still holds an important place in the lives of many US consumers. In fact, over 58% of US consumers with Internet access start their mornings off by checking email. Only 11% check Facebook first thing.

Email is also the most common way for companies and brands to connect with customers. According to ExactTarget, 93% of online consumers subscribe to emails from the companies they patronize, receiving one or more permission-based marketing emails per day. In contrast, 43% of consumers either “Like” a brand on Facebook or follow one on Twitter.

The other thing is that all of those teenagers who don’t use email on a daily basis today may well start using it more when they get a little bit older and their life circumstances change. As Good Morning Silicon Valley notes:

“The problem with that is that those teens, who for now lead mostly carefree lives with no bills to pay, and who have time for face-to-face interaction, will eventually grow up. For now, they have no professional need for e-mail. But they will, and they will find that it generally isn’t wise to reveal details about a work project via commenting on Facebook.”

However, that doesn’t mean that marketers can afford to ignore social media in favor of email. Social networking sites continue to grow in reach, frequency of use and importance, especially among younger adults. For example, another recent study by Nielsen notes that 22% of all time spent online is spent on social networking sites, and the average visitor to a social networking site spends 66% more time there than last year.

Also, social networking fans are more likely to engage with and share content from a brand they’ve connected with. ExactTarget notes that people who visit Facebook first thing in the morning are more likely to engage with brands for purely social reasons than are people who visit email first. However, the overwhelming majority of consumers in both categories listed “promotions and deals” as their top reason for seeking interaction with brands online.

Fortunately, there’s no need to choose one or the other. For most marketers, the wisest move is to create campaigns that incorporate both email and social media to achieve the greatest possible reach and effectiveness.

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Tweeting Away “This Commercial Break”

When companies buy advertising space during a major television event, they are supposedly paying a premium for viewers’ attention. But we viewers have never liked having our attention bought and sold-it’s been a cat-and-mouse game to get us to actually watch commercials since the invention of the remote control in 1950. Interesting fact, by the way-the remote control was invented by Zenith Radio Corporation’s engineering team expressly for the purpose of providing an escape hatch from commercials.

Now, as MediaPost’s George Simpson has noted, it seems that social media may have provided us with yet another way to deprive TV advertisers of our attention. The conclusion of Lost, for example, spawned 437,613 tweets, and the number of tweets sent spiked during every commercial break. Simpson observes:

This probably gives a little heartburn to the media buyers who bought time on the finale (probably at a premium, since the ratings were expected to be high — if you can call under 14 million viewers high any more). Moreover, only about 200,000 viewers watched the big ending from start to finish. Most were too busy thumbing their cell phones to look up at the commercials.

Simpson doesn’t understand why anyone would want to tweet about “Lost” to begin with, but of course if you paid any attention to the show at all (or had friends who did), you know that half the fun was trying to decode Lost’s sprawling, incomprehensible mythology, an activity best undertaken with a group of other like-minded fans. Twitter provided Lost geeks with the opportunity to discuss the show with an entire Twitterverse of fellow fans during commercial breaks, inadvertently depriving media buyers of their eyeballs.

There is a lesson to be learned here: Certain traditional marketing tactics are becoming less and less powerful as consumers become better and better at screening them out.

Used wisely, social media gives you an opportunity to create an experience that’s more interactive and draws your customers in without annoying them. It can also be a great place to harness the power of word of mouth. People appreciate getting recommendations from their family, friends and other social networking connections, so these have more power than all but the catchiest TV jingle.

While there are very few companies that can get by on social media alone, integrating it into your existing marketing mix gives you a powerful tool to help you connect with your customers- especially the ones who head for Twitter when the commercials start!

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8 Reasons to Add Social Sharing to Your Next Email Campaign

How can your email campaigns benefit from integrating social media? To find out, MarketingSherpa surveyed email marketers to see how adding social media to their email campaigns has helped them.

Using their survey results, along with other research and our experience here at Dukky, here are 8 great reasons to start incorporating social media elements into your email campaigns:

Reason #1-Increasing awareness

Adding social sharing to an email campaign is an easy and effective way to increase awareness of your brand. Social sharing prompts your customers to forward your offer to their friends and family, generating positive word-of-mouth that people are likely to remember. MarketingSherpa found that 35% of email marketers believed social sharing was “very effective” at increasing awareness, while 58% believed it was “somewhat effective.”

Reason #2-Increasing Reach

By generating positive word-of-mouth, social sharing also increases the reach of your campaign. According to MarketingSherpa, an analysis by email service provider Silverpop found that adding social sharing to an email campaign increased the reach of that campaign by an average of 24.3%.

Reason #3-Increasing ROI

Since social sharing increases the reach of your campaign at minimal additional cost, it often greatly increases the ROI. To increase ROI even more, you can also use your company’s social media accounts to support your email campaigns with appropriate content and messaging. MarketingSherpa found that 22% of email marketers rated social sharing as “very effective” for increasing ROI, while 51% found it “somewhat effective.”

Reason #4: Get past the “spam filter”

Sure, your emails may be getting past your customer’s email providers spam filter, but does that mean your customers ever really SEE them? Not necessarily…people’s inboxes are bombarded by so much unwanted marketing material that they develop pretty keen “spam filters” of their own, screening much of it out.

However, when someone forwards an email of yours to their friends and family, their friends and family are almost guaranteed to pay attention, unless the customer in question is an incorrigible sender of junk mail and chain letters. Great aunt Flo, I’m looking at you!

Reason #5- Grow your lists

Incorporating social sharing into your email campaign can also help you build your lists. Your customers undoubtedly have people in their networks who are interested in your product-by allowing them to share your offer, you can bring these other potential customers into the fold.

20% of the email marketers surveyed be MarketingSherpa found adding social media components to their email campaigns to be “very effective” at growing email lists, while 52% said it was “somewhat effective.”

Reason #6 Encourage Customer Loyalty

Did you know that customers you gain through recommendations are more loyal to your brand, right from the start? It’s true-a 2009 study by PeopleMetrics found that “A customer is more willing to forgive a service failure if they chose that organization on the strength of a friend or family member’s recommendation than if they came to the company ‘cold.’”

Reason #7: Lead generation

Combining email and social media is also a great way to get more leads. According to MarketingSherpa, 21% of email marketers believed this technique was “very effective” for lead generation, while 55% felt it was “somewhat effective.”

Reason #8: Identifying your Influencers

When you use Dukky to add social sharing to your email campaigns, you get the added benefit of being able to easily identify which of your customers exercise the most influence on behalf of your brand. Find out who your biggest influencers are, and create special rewards and promotions just for them to keep them talking about your company.

Did I miss any reasons? Post them in the comments!

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5 Reasons Your Marketing Strategy Needs Social Media

In the past couple of months, the need for marketers to integrate social media with email and other direct response marketing campaigns has become increasingly apparent. Has your marketing strategy changed yet? Here are 5 reasons why it needs to:

Social Media is Becoming a National Obsession

A study commissioned by Retrevo shows just how much of a priority social media is becoming. 48% of respondents report checking social networking sites after they go to bed at night or first thing when they wake up in the morning. 56% check Facebook at least once a day; 12% check Facebook every couple of hours.

Facebook is More Popular than Google

Not too long ago, claiming that a social media site could ever unseat Google would likely have been greeted with an reaction similar to the one that greeted John Lennon when he claimed that the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus.”

But now, Hitwise is reporting that for the week ending March 13, 2010, Facebook was the most-visited website in the country. Facebook. Not Google.

Facebook and Twitter Drive Purchasing Decisions

Facebook and Twitter aren’t just places where people hang out and socialize in a virtual world. They also drive purchasing behavior, as shown in this study by Chadwick Martin Bailey.

In the study, 60% of Facebook fans and 79% of Twitter followers said that they were more likely to recommend brands that they follow on Facebook or Twitter. 51% of Facebook fans and 67% of Twitter followers were more likely to buy products from brands they follow on social networking sites.

Email Drives Social Media Sharing

However, other studies show that it would be utter folly to disregard traditional direct response marketing via channels like email. For example, this study, by Merkle, found that people still spend a lot of time in their inboxes. 71% of respondents spend 20 minutes or more each week on personal email use-a figure that’s unchanged from last year.

People that use social networks extensively are also more likely to use email frequently, and they are twice as likely as non-social networking users to access email through their mobile phones.

Even more important for marketers, 20% of social networking users have shared items from their email inbox on social networking sites. For your customers, email use now goes hand-in-hand with social networking, and your marketing efforts need to reflect that.

Everybody’s Doing it

That last statistic indicates how important it is to design integrated email campaigns. Your customer’s email inbox is, in many cases, the key to reaching their social networking accounts. With integrated campaigns and compelling, shareable offers (basically, what we specialize in here at Dukky), you’re not just emailing your customers, you’re emailing all of their Facebook friends, and their friends, and the people that follow them on Twitter…

According to e-Marketer, more and more marketers are attempting to tap into the potential of social sharing with their email marketing campaigns. The “Email Marketing Industry Census 2010” from Econsultancy and Adestra, found that 37% of respondents are already using social sharing as part of their email campaigns and 31% plan to start doing so in the next year. Don’t get left behind!

Dukky makes it easy to integrate social sharing into email or direct mail marketing campaigns. With our PURLS, your customers can share offers via email or on Facebook and Twitter-wherever they feel comfortable sharing.

Dukky makes it easy to raise awareness of your company on Facebook and Twitter by turning your customers into advocates. Plus, you get real-time analytics that let you measure response rates in real time!

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Social and Email: When Worlds Collide

Over the past couple of weeks, 2 important stories have rocked the Internet: the launch of Google Buzz, and the news that Facebook intends to launch an email service of its own, called Project Titan.

Of course, Google’s product launch hasn’t gone off without a hitch-the company was a little bit too confident in its ability to automatically calculate which email contacts its customers would actually want to connect with socially, and privacy concerns and lawsuits have ensued.

Still, Google is fixing those issues, and it’s way too early to pronounce Buzz dead in the water. In fact, as MediaPost notes, Buzz is “the beginning of a hub that could eventually connect to forums, third-party PC and mobile applications, as well as other social sites.”

Facebook’s Project Titan is still being developed, but it is already hotly anticipated and expected to compete with Gmail.

On the Bronto blog, Kristen Gregory, Email Marketing Strategist for Bronto Software, called Project Titan “a move that takes us more toward a truly integrated channel – where search, email, social, etc. reside together and where the idea of a master preference center could ultimately live.”

Taken together, these two stories seem to signal a broader trend- the impending merger of email and social networking. Some people love the idea, some people hate the idea, but the same was once true of Twitter and Facebook. As the lines between the two begin to blur, how should brands and marketers react?

Email that’s integrated with social networking demands direct response campaigns that are integrated as well. Even today, our experience has shown that integrating social media and sharing capabilities into an email campaign improves response and conversion dramatically. As the email inbox turns into a social networking command center, users will be encouraged to engage in social sharing even more than they do now.

Dukky makes it easy to integrate social media and email campaigns. With our platform, recipients can share offers by email or on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Even better, with our analytics, you can see who is responding, who is sharing your offers and how they are sharing them, and more, all in real time.

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