Measuring social media is easy enough, measuring email marketing is extremely easy but measuring both from an integrated perspective as in social email marketing? It seems like few people know exactly how and what and I think that this is the reason why some recent surveys say that marketers want to invest in social email marketing but that there is no obvious proven return.
My guess is that there is no proven return because there is no proper measurement and that has everything to do with a lack of implementing cross-channel metrics which is caused by a lack of an integrated marketing view. I submitted the issue to the people of Radian 6 by mail. Curious to see what they think. Or maybe it’s better to ask Email Data Source: last November they launched version 4.0 of their Email Analyst platform to monitor competitive Twitter marketing offers.
It is the first monitoring tool that combines email and social media and that enables marketers to compare the efficiency of both (Twitter and email in this case).
This is done by using social media measurement metrics within the context of reach, frequency, and effectiveness, metrics that marketers understand and enable them to compare apples to apples, as Email Data Source puts it. Indeed, we need to speak a common metrics language, regardless of tactics and channels.
Maybe the principles apply to other social media.
However, the main question is: what do we measure? In the end everybody knows it’s about sales and the bottom line but how do you get from Twitter followers to the bottom line or from social email marketing?
If you’re interested, you find information about the Email Data Source tool on their homepage and the press release they’ve sent back in November here.
Great questions.
When using a tool like Radian6 to assist monitoring a social e-marketing campaign, you would want to set up a topic profile to listen for specific keywords related to the
email campaign and the sharable content attached to it. This would create a baseline of mentions prior to the launch. Then when the email campaign is launched it spreads the content out to the community that it hopefully be relevant to. If it is relevant then the community will start to share it in their various networks (tweeting it, blogging about it, commenting on the videos (if there were videos)etc…) All of this activity in public social networks can then be tracked and measured to determine the level of buzz, level of engagement, commenting activity etc..against the baseline that was taken
prior to the campaign.
Also, part of the problem around poor social media lift is that many companies are probably still sharing promotional messages in their email campaigns as opposed to content relevant to people that are reaching out to. Very few people are willing to read let alone share promotional messages. However, if you have content that is worthy and the mechanisms are there to easily share it then I think companies will start to see the lift they would expect.
I think the sticking point for many marketers is how to map the social
conversation across all channels online and offline. The key is to integrate your social media efforts into traditional marketing and aligning with overall business goals. In measurement, you have to go beyond hits to know where and how people are engaging and then loop those conversations back to
the individual and sales/decision making cycle. One way to do this is to
integrate your email campaign response with legacy CRM systems. There is a
lot of elbow grease and manual tracking involved to connect all the dots and
properly measure to show return.
I would also suggest
overlaying the social conversation and keywords with your site interaction
data. The Radian6 tool integrates with Webtrends data and this is a great
start. For more information about this type of integration, please visit:
http://www.radian6.com/applications/social-meets-web-analytics/ and
http://www.radian6.com/applications/sales-and-lead-generation/.
Please let me know if you have any further questions. This is a great topic to explore.
Lauren Vargas
Community Manager at Radian6
@VargasL
Excellent post… Very informational and educational. Keep up the good work!
Thanks, I’ll do my best!