Today I went to the Technology For Marketing & Advertising (TFM&A) show in London where my time was spent alternating between making apologetic faces at exhibitors (no I don’t have thousands of pounds to spend on your shiny software) and scribbling pages of notes in the seminars.
Ironically (for a day about digital stuff) I scribbled pages and pages of notes in my notebook (well, its a little book and I have big writing) and will be adding them here for you to read and ponder. If you want to buy me one of these I can make sure I get my thoughts to you faster in future 🙂
As I picked up so many interesting bits and things that might be useful for other people on my course I’m breaking this down into a series of posts.
The first session I went to was ‘Tying Social and Email Together – Designing a multi-channel campaign‘ by a speaker from ExactTarget which focused on how email and social media can complement each other.
We’ve moved from a one way organisation to consumer relationship in which the organisation tells the consumer what to think to a consumer to other consumers relationship where they tell the brand what they think. Data about customers is now a key business asset.
Email: Familiarity, manageability, trust & privacy, relevancy, exclusivity
Facebook: Connection, self-expression, entertainment, discovery, control
Twitter: Influence, brevity, accessibility, interaction, versatility -> Twitter has the most potential to drive affinity (or damage your brand) as users talk about your brand
Email marketing is becoming more targeted and more relevant, e.g. Amazon emails based on purchase/browsing history, which means a higher conversion rate and higher ROI. Advanced segmentation can be based on demographics, engagement, purchase behaviour and/or brand advocacy
‘Forward to a friend’ in emails can be developed using social share, e.g. encouraging people to share things on Facebook/Twitter. This also helps identify brand advocates.
SMS can be used to convert customers to online (with all the data analysis benefits that brings), e.g. high street shops (an environment where most people have their mobile phone with them) using an in-store discount as an incentive to text your email address to their shortcode.
All the research we’re doing here is suggesting that people are much happier to just cut and paste links into their preferred social networks, rather than use the buttons on various sites to forward to friends.
Facebook have just changed how like buttons work again, which may change things, but the copy/paste thing makes it very difficult to track and convert users into advocates.
The example they used to illustrate that point in this session was from within an email rather than on a site. Lots of other people very over-excited about ‘social share’ though, no mention/suggestion that people could choose how they share, only screenshots of rows of share buttons for various sites. Sounds like they’re missing a trick!
Interesting thought using in store SMS capture to migrate customer online…