Having worked for a leading email service provider the methods and effectiveness of email as a marketing channel has always been held in high regard by me. Having preached and taught all my clients about best practice, great techniques and how to utilise email marketing to it's full potential, it dawned on me that a lot of these principles can be implemented through your messaging on social networks like Twitter.
So I have broken down the lessons we can take from effective email marketing and how they can be implemented via Twitter.
Your Audience (List Data / Followers)
Who is your audience? It always used to be a classic numbers game in email marketing the bigger your email lists the better. Luckily this changed especially in the last few years as email became increasingly popular, spam filters got cleverer and people became less tolerant due to the massive amount of unsolicited email they were receiving. Companies started to realise it was much better to have a database of people that were engaging with your communications.
So with Twitter is it better to have many followers or a smaller amount of engaged ones? With numerous twitter clients like Tweetdeck it is very easy to ignore the noise and have your tweets filtered out rather than filtered in. Even though you can't control who follows you on Twitter you can however limit who you follow and how you promote your twitter account. For big consumer brands the Dell approach seemed to work with multiple identities so the user has the option to follow the one most relevant to their needs, sales offers versus company information etc. You see this approach working in email marketing a lot where on the point of sign up you can opt in to the messages you want to receive. So, give people a choice.
Timing
There have been many discussions and thoughts on the best time to send emails dependant on whether your audience is B2B or B2C. Clearly a Friday afternoon B2B marketing email is not going to get much attention compared to a Wednesday afternoon or perhaps lunchtime when most people in work have time to look at personal emails. This is just an example and with most people always online this may vary so I would always recommend testing and measuring to see when you get the best responses.
These same principles can apply to tweets. For one, your audience may be international so your American followers won't be seeing your prime time tweets for the UK audience. Clearly there is also the issue of people accessing twitter at different times and you want to maximize effectiveness of your tweets. There have been some interesting studies and analysis out there about the best time to tweet if you are looking to perhaps target an influencer in your followers you can check out Tweet O'Clock which gives you the best time to tweet an individual. If you're a UK company and have an international audience a good time to tweet would be 5:00pm GMT which crosses three major break times, work arrival west coast of US, end of business day London, lunchtime east coast US.
The other thing to note is you are never going to get maximum exposure with one tweet so repeating tweets is definitely an option. Guy Kawasaki uses this strategy, but make sure you are repeating with timeframes that are reasonably far apart. There are many Twitter clients that allow automatic scheduling like Hoot Suite. This principle has been used in email marketing for a long time especially if you are using an email service provider. For example using re-targeting techniques for recipients that didn’t engage with your original email. It gives you an option to tweak or change your message to try and encourage engagement from inactive recipients, for example changing the subject line, further discount options if it is a sales promotion so why not work this tactic with twitter?
Subject line
One of the most important elements of why people open your emails is the subject line as this is your chance to grab the individual's attention, give them a reason to open your email. Again the principals of testing and measurement come in to play here but if you are posting a link to your blog or an interesting piece of content on twitter you want that click through so the text accompanying the link needs to be enticing. I have often found some highly clicked twitter links have actually had no text this is probably just the intrigue factor from followers so be creative with subject lines and tweets.
Frequency
No one likes a spammer! Email your recipients too much and they tend to opt out, this is obviously dependant on the content. Tweet too much and I think this can have the same effect - people will stop following you. Too little and people forget about your brand and you are not communicating enough to be at the forefront of their mind.
Measurement and Analysis
This is one of the most important factors in any online marketing, this is key to understanding how your customers or prospects are interacting with you whatever the platform. I have mentioned already the importance of testing and the measurement aspect needs to be there in order to test. Email marketing is great for this as you can get a whole heap of information on opens, click through rates, how many, what time, best subject line (multi-variant testing is available from most email service providers) content breakdown, heat maps the lot. This gives you a great opportunity to understand your audience and segment your data based on interest and previous interactions and start to market more smartly and effectively. You are reasonably limited with Twitter but using URL shorteners like Bit.ly with the pro version you can pull out some interesting data. There are lots of free tools out there to find out your most retweeted content, who your influencers are in your network and lots more, so it is important to measure the success of your tweets and always keep refining and working out what your audience likes and how they engage.
So we have old school Email versus new school Twitter - old and trusted platform versus the new social networking platform interesting that some of the same principles apply
Be great to have your thoughts
