Lean Test Social Media to cut through nurturing clutter
Have been sending too many 'nurturing' emails, got high unsubscribe rates and nastygrams on social media from your existing customers? This is an all too familiar scenario in an enterprise. We may have lead scoring in place and a kick ass email marketing platform that sends out emails based on user behaviour but still the hate mail from customers tend to continue. Whilst this is going on, you still need to hit your KPI's and achieve the bottom line.
How do you get away from pissing someone off to making them click on a link that you send them? Social media might be the answer. Think of your own behaviour for a second. Remember that awkward market seller who tried to sell you a scarf for cheap? (well, I do!!!) I did not need a scarf and he was in my face all the time and I hated it. Email can sometimes act as that annoying market seller. You may think you are doing the right thing and might have softened the tone of the email to a none salesy nature but your colleagues from a different team may have been bombarding the customer with service updates and weekly newsletters and he might be livid due to the sheer number of emails your organisation had sent him.
Ideally you should do an email audit, understand the frequency of emails, create an email calendar and create rules in your email marketing platform to not spam customers. But this cannot happen overnight and you need to make sure your marketing messages go out on time to your customers and they respond to your desired CTA's.
If you are a content marketer your main objective is to get prospects as well as existing customers to read your content and then potentially share them. But if you're considered a spammer by your end customers, then this task becomes difficult. However, using platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook you can now reach out to your users in a much more subtle manner.
Here's a typical usecase. You're sending an email to your existing customers regarding a new white paper about a new type of SMB tax that your content team has developed. Your objective is to spread the message and maximise downloads. However, the email unsubscribe rates of your customer base is pretty high, the open rates are low, the downloads are dreadful and the initial email is a flop. What you could potentially do is to understand where your existing customers are hanging out socially and use that platform to send them a message. For e.g. if your end consumer is a SMB in the UK, then the likelyhood is that your customer is on the look out for HMRC news, SMB grants, Promo opportunities etc...Which means most probably they may have subscribed to websites such as businesszone and also may hang out on LinkedIn and FB, professionally and socially.
Depending on your budget and timelines, the best option might be to lean test a quick campaign on one or two of these sites. You could do a sponsored update on LinkedIn and potentially run some display ads on Facebook informing your target audience about this white paper. This target audience needs to be profiled to match your current customer base. This way, you will be able to get to your customers in a much more effective manner. One could argue that due to lack of brand, one might not get the necessary leads but the counter argument to that is the purporse of the campaign is to target existing customers who know your brand, hence engagement should be higher than the neutral sample.
Another quick tip is to ask for your customers' twitter handles during signup/registration so that even if they don't respond to your emails you still have a platform to connect with them.
Just use your channels wisely and don't over use existing customer comms chanels such as email. Make your media more integrated so that you have one way or the other to communicate with your customers. Don't forget, you're not the only one sending emails to your customers so make sure you send the right message at the right time to the right person and don't over do it!
