Augmenting your customer database with user interest data from social network profiles is possible using Flowtown or Rapleaf. But these solutions require an email database for you to plug-in to their systems. If you don't have an email database yet, you can still gain some insight into how your audience interacts with social media by tapping into market research conducted by Exact Target, Forrester and GlobalWebIndex. Play time:
Forrester Research
Exact Target
Understand and Implement SEO with this strategy guide and checklist. Yours for a tweet!
The total number of social network users in New Zealand is about 2.3 million people.
The total Internet population of New Zealand was 3.5 million as of 2009. Assuming a nominal growth rate of 5%, the 2010 figure is around 3.675 million people. Therefore, 62% of the internet population are social network users.
Note that this chart covers only social networks and not publishing platforms with community features like Youtube, Wordpress and Slideshare.
Feel free to re-use this chart, but please link back to this page referencing Social Network Stats | Kryptonite.co.nz as the source.
There are 1.65 million kiwis or 72% of social network users on Facebook. NZ Daily Unique Visitors
NZ Daily Unique Visitors
Bebo is in steady decline as its audience migrates to Facebook. However, for now, Bebo is still more popular than Myspace.
NZ Daily Unique Visitors
Myspace is steadily losing volume, but they have a very niche, music-centric offering.
NZ Daily Unique Visitors
Linkedin is steadily increasing its New Zealand user baser. They claim 250,000 members, but the actual number of active users is closer to 180,000.
NZ Daily Unique Visitors
Sources:
Preference. With greater freedom to choose, we as online marketers must enhance our targeting capabilities so that we get noticed by a larger proportion of our potential audience (subscribers, followers and fans.) I feel like i'm stating the obvious here, but ExactTarget have provided the evidence to back it up: People don't interact with brands in silos:
There's an overlap between channels like Email, Facebook and Twitter but different audience subsets have their preferred interaction channel. For example, it's a younger audience that is more likely to share your message on Facebook.
The report supports what we have come to accept as best practice content guidelines for engagement:
On Facebook, provide infotainment
On Twitter, it's all about what's new and keeping people informed.
How is Social Media impacting your email marketing?
Segmentation data that allows us to deliver relevant and well-timed communications comes from querying our databases. Unless you have an understanding of SQL, you will require the assistance of your IT department. If you don't have one already, the first thing to do is write a functional specification for an email marketing dashboard. This will allow marketing to get on with their job with minimal delay.
Looking beyond our own customer data we can now create individual customer profiles based on data publicly available on social networks. Here's a couple of situations to illustrate how this can be useful:
Read on to learn how to build a subscriber's social network profile using Flowtown. The great thing is you can import the data into your CRM system.
As email marketers, we are fundamentally interested in finding ways to increase:
Even though social network usage has surpassed email, this chart suggests that email still rules the roost. 9/10 US consumers receive promotional email, only 4/10 are followers of a brand on Facebook and only 5% follow on Twitter. However, the results are overly simplistic for 2 reasons:
1. Once customers are given the choice to hear from a business via social media in addition to or in place of email, the gap will narrow. Greater freedom in contact choice is also linked to greater loyalty.
2. Furthermore, the comparison fails to take into account the increased viral potential offered by Facebook. The average Facebook user has 130 friends who could potentially see your brand endorsement and continue to exponentially spread your message. This fact alone is compelling enough to make your social network page the hub of a promotion using WildfireApp, run an e-commerce store using Payvment or do a product launch like SPCA Petfood or Dentyne have successfully done. With 500 million users worldwide, Facebook is a safe bet, but for data to back up a channel decision, try using Flowtown to build a social profile for each customer.
1. The most elementary of steps is to include social sharing links in your email
It's time to go beyond the default 'email to a friend' option. Here's why:
A Getresponse poll that analysed 500 million emails that included links for Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Digg found found that:
2. The next step is to create hybrid email that drives traffic to both your website and social media.
More people use social networks than email. It's prudent for us to position ourselves to adapt to changing contact preferences. So in your email communications, you can demonstrate a compelling reason to connect with you on a social network including samples of the unique content available and remember the entertainment and social-interaction elements that people are looking for. Balance the email with your regular product offers that customers have come to expect. Remember, either/or options are better than yes/no options.
Your marketing team should be able to copy/paste the needed HTML code, or you could try using a hosted email marketing provider like iContact, Netsuite or GetResponse that have built-in social media features (including tracking.)
One of the key questions for a business is:
"Which social media channel should I use?"
There is a need to justify the investment of resources. The answer is to focus on the networks that your customers are already using. Go to where they already are rather than trying a "build it and they will come" approach.
Furthermore, this is also a way of identifying which social network is likely to be a source of new customers. Since your existing customers are on the network, it's reasonable to infer that people like them (that like your product) can also be found on that network. One useful tool to help identify which social network(s) you should focus on is Flowtown.
It's easy to create social profiles for every person in your email database:
A social profile provides data on a customer's demographics and interests as indicated on the social network and can therefore be used to not only enhance your social media marketing, but also to send more relevant and targeted email communications.
An alternative to Flowtown worth assessing is Rapleaf.
Kunal Kripalani
“Kunal's approach was refreshing. From the outset he was results oriented, and his ability to quickly understand our business (www.firstin.co.nz), allowed us to prioritise the improvement of the crucial components of our offer. The result: The implementation was quick, and Kunal's recommendations represent a significant part of the 250% growth we have experienced over the last 5 months. Kunal's involvement, was a great investment - he has implemented a new approach in how we relate to our customers, and it has paid off.” Mathew Duder, Director, Firstin.co.nz
“Kunal is highly Internet savvy. He has an excellent understanding of web trends which is very valuable to many companies in today's market.” Daniel Robertson, CEO, Fishpond.co.nz / Fishpond.com.au
@KunalKripalani
kunal@kryptonite.co.nz
NZ: +64 21 792795
Integrating Digital & Social Media Marketing
