Forget twitter it’s back to email marketing? Well maybe not, but a couple of things this week reminded me that email marketing is still useful and it is still used a lot.
First off was a post I caught on Larry Bodine’s blog entitled “Forget Twitter, Go Back to Email Marketing”. Now I don’t necessarily agree with the title, but there is a point in the article that I do agree with. The fact that “There is limitless opportunity for real interaction with your customers sitting right there in your email database” i.e. start using email better to interact rather than just ‘tell people’ and the fact that in most law firms CRM systems I bet there isn’t one twitter username, but there will be hundreds of email addresses.
Second was that I attended the inaugural user group for the Tikit eMarketing product yesterday (this is basically a bolt on to InterAction that manages email marketing activity) and I was surprised at the turn out. It shows that email marketing is still big for law firms.
So does the Tikit product address the direction of the blog post? i.e. the ability to react and engage with those you are mailing?
The upcoming release (v4.6) looks promising.
As well as consolidating the user interfaces of the current version and improving the technical side. There are changes proposed to enhance the reporting to generate metrics from multiple mailings and compare. So you can start to see what content is relevant to which clients. All this can be linked back to InterAction data to categorise by contact types, folders etc
These changes are setting the platform to build on the product in 2010 to allow enhanced process flows and multiple page events (allowing choices to be made by the recipient and different content delivered). There are also plans to enhance the ability for fee earners to deliver dynamic content to clients simply through the InterAction interface. There was also a session at the end on Spam. And this is the difficulty in trying to get personal in email marketing, especially if you go down the articles path of emails from partners addresses rather than “noreply@bigcompany.com”. Last thing you want is a badly formed email broadcast resulting in the partners email address being added to a spam list!
Email marketing though is still widely used and is definitely here to stay for a while, products like this are allowing you to make it more individual and relevant by track the metrics and allowing dynamic personalised content.
I did ask the “Twitter” question to the product team in a coffee break and although it isn’t planned I did get the impression that discussions about it had taken place internally. But the feeling they had was one I can see, how would you integrate twitter campaigns into CRM systems? I had an initial think on the way back and came up with:
- You could broadcast links to content and track clickthru’s, can’t really see real benefits of that as you could gain this from web stats.
- If twitter usernames were collected in the CRM system then you could @ or direct message your customers?
- Maybe you could add to the first point a tracking of RT’s of your articles and collate this information as to which twitter users are interested in what content?
But I concluded that I’m still not sure twitter is tuned to traditional eMarketing, it’s less a centralised marketing function and more an individual tool. I’m sure though there is some way to link the two, but haven’t thought of it yet. Any ideas?
I have been interested in this also, the only problem I see with twitter marketing is that extra resource needs to be applied because you’d really want it to be an active form of marketing rather than passive.
When an email shot is sent out people either read it or they delete it, rarely do they reply directly. Because of twitters nature you would get replies.. if the marketing department did not reply it would be seen as ignoring customers, this is the issue for me.
Do you see it as merely another avenue to “get your message out there” or as a two way communication medium for marketing departments.
I’m interested.
I have got to admit I have never really got into the twitter marketing. Having an update Email newsletter list to do your Email marketing in my book is still gold. However I think i will need to spend some time on twitter this week testing to see if it can provide a good ROI.
Krystan I see exactly where you’re coming from. And Lawyer Solicitors I agree that those contacts are still gold, but I’m thinking at the moment that maybe email marketing needs to become “more twitter like” and generate the two way communication.
I certainly get pulled to websites much more by twitter and RSS than emails, in fact I’m about to cull a number of such emails I receive as I’m just deleting them without reading them at the moment.
I’m sure I saw a twitter tool for marketing somewhere that did manage multiple accounts and track things, but I just can’t recall where or what it is called.
I can definately see the attraction of twitter marketing, and I agree that ‘twitter like’ marketing services are definately attractive, and if the tools exist to make the tracking of replies possible (I haven’t looked) I feel this would defiantely be of use. As ‘twitter space’ evolves I beleive traditional business will definately see this as an opportunity and not a ‘fad’ as a lot of inward looking departments may do at the moment.
I tried twitter marketing for a while last year but didn’t really reap the rewards for all the hard work I put in.
Perhaps it’s their demographics as they seem to be aimed at a younger audience and not really the age group of potential clients.
Just my opinion of course and I could be wrong. 🙂
Great read, thanks for the interesting article.
Jane