Is social media marketing right for you?

In recent years in the email marketing world a succession of incremental changes and the structured introduction of features have produced a more streamlined, efficient functionality for marketers.  With the right kind of usage these features can still produce a highly attractive ROI compared with all other marketing tools.

Is email dead?

As is customary near the beginning of the year, posts and newsletters have appeared recently asking the question, "Is email dead?" and this question almost always goes on to suggest that social media marketing will take its place. So is it appropriate that as email marketers we should ask a few questions about social media? Is it indeed right for your company? Is it an effective marketing tool? How can I maximise its efficiency?

But surely the real question is, "How can we measure its effectiveness?" and the inevitable supplementary question, "If we cannot measure the results accurately how do we know we are using it effectively?"

What can be agreed on? Well we know that one of the powerful features of email marketing is the ability to measure results, one consequence of which is that ROI can be accurately calculated. We also know that whilst social media is a sophisticated digital tool its ease of use makes communication with existing and potential customers very straightforward.

What we can't be sure of is whether email is the better way of interacting with this vital customer group, whether the undoubtedly efficient communication channels of the likes of Facebook and Twitter should bias you toward social media. Or, and this is my preferred option, the use of the tools in conjunction with each other.

Deciding whether social media is right for you

This still leaves us with the dilemma of how to measure social media responses in a meaningful way. One US social measurement organisation, Syncapse, tried to put a value on a "like". This however does not take into account the essentially ephemeral loyalty of social media users. A "like" expressed one day does not mean a commitment to a brand. An additional complication is that no two social networks give comparable figures.

There is no question that many large, well known brands gain high numbers of impressions and likes and seem quite content to accept that these possibly convert into some value for the brand without a true understanding of who produces these likes and why.

For smaller companies whose marketing team’s time and budget is limited some form of measurement has to be more important. Perhaps then companies should go back to basics and establish forms of measurement on the foundation of their business objectives. Creating KPIs from sales figures, customer surveys, etc. is pretty much standard and while the exact influence of social media on those, may be in part conjecture, at least the figures provide a solid foundation. In many ways the question ‘Is social media right for you?’ can only be answered at a company level and by considering the use of social media marketing in conjunction with other tools.

Email marketing is still key!

And this is where I come back to email marketing as a bedrock of your marketing plan. It's very nature allows you to create accurate KPI's and to regularly calculate results in monetary terms (ROI).

There is no question that social media can give a company a rapid communications channel to existing and potential customers and the means to provide information in an almost personal way, the terms Business to Personal was devised to suit Social Media. There are programmes available which "analyse" keywords within social media comments and thus purport to provide viable statistics, but these are machine analyses.

With email the reporting metrics are simply available for human analysis and thus far more pertinent to the overall marketing plan. My ultimate solution then is a cross fertilisation of the two tools, use the superb communications facility of social networks integrated with the accurate reporting structure of emailing.