Social Email Marketing: Email as the Hub of your Social Media Interactions #SMMSF

This presentation took place at the Social Email Marketing event, put on by Influence People with lead sponsor Constant Contact.  The conference took place on Friday, September 17, 2010 at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco, CA.  In this session, Mark shared insights from small business owners and provided real world examples of how social media marketing delivered the best results when combined with email marketing.

I loved that real examples were used of small companies that no one on the national scene has heard of that used social media locally for their business.  It was some thought-provoking stuff!  These small businesses made email and social media work together to maximize their results.  The speaker was:

• Mark Schmulen, Director of Social Media, Constant Contact (@mschmulen)

Bullet Point Review!

• The typical small business has less than 20 employees.
• Instead of asking “Should I be using Facebook?”, small businesses are now asking, “How do we get business results from this?”.
• Traditional marketing focuses on the acquisition.  The emphasis is put on finding, then converting, then keeping.
• Interactive marketing focuses on the customer service.  The emphasis is on keeping, then converting, then finding.
• There’s 5 categories of people when it relates to your business:
  • Disinterested
  • Suspects
  • Prospects
  • Customers
  • Raving Fans
• Don’t waste your time on the disinterested and focus on the rest.
• 14% of people trust ads, 78% trust recommendations.
• 51% of people made a purchase based on a recommendation.
• Turn your email subscribers into Facebook fans.
• All the channels matter – it’s about the customers and their choice of how they want to interact.  Be wherever they are.
• You need to collect people’s emails because that’s longer lasting than some social media sites will be.
• Putting a share feature in emails clearly increases sharing, but it also decreases people reporting your email as spam.  This helps your reputation with the ESPs in the future.

Here’s Mark’s slide presentation: