Social Email Marketing

The title of this post might seem a bit silly but with an increasing amount of emails sent, ever more email clients (remember Facebook’s plans), the need to focus on relevant content to avoid unsubscribes (and get your emails delivered) and lots of email clients blocking images, it is certainly a topic email marketers are concerned with.

On top of that, with the changing policies of ISPs regarding deliverability (where content, interaction and open rates become increasingly important), you can’t talk about it enough.

Many emails from businesses, even highly targeted marketing emails, do not even get opened. They get binned, marked as spam (often unnecessarily), or archived right from the get-go, and never see the light of day.

Social media are said to be great for customer service purposes. And many companies do have a social media presence to service their customers. I guess you know the names of those that do it successfully on Twitter, for instance.

Last week-end I noticed a tweet from someone asking for help from a well-known software company by tweeting that he needed support and stating why, using the @company.

I asked him – via Twitter – to tell me if the company would answer. Later he tweeted me that they didn’t but that they helped him elsewhere online. Today I read that the company did help him via Twitter. So, kudos to the software company.

However, this small story made me think. I know how frustrating it can be if you have a problem with the software you rely on everyday, and I can be extremely impatient to get help then myself.