How can marketers use the power of email and Pinterest together to drive retail sales?

I’m sure you have heard, joined or read about Pinterest at some point in the last few months. Although Pinterest has been around since March 2010 and is still an invite only social network, it recently has been gaining a tremendous amount of traction and popularity.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Pinterest, here’s a quick primer. If you’re familiar with Delicious and other link saving services, Pinterest is a more visual version of those.

Pinning is easy with the Pin It button, a simple drag and drop browser extension. Pinterest is a great way to drive traffic back to your site. Each pinned photo includes a link back to the source site (you click once to see the pin page and again to see the source site). Most pins are photos, but you can pin videos too. If a video link is pinned, Pinterest embeds that video inside the pin. It’s a good way of spreading a tip when it has to be seen to be understood. Repins and likes share a common interest, making it easier to take the conversation to Twitter and Facebook to nurture the relationship.

Pinterest offers a way for brands to build interaction with their audiences and to visually attract current and potential customers. Using the power of image, companies can create interest around products, display more in depth aspects of their business, and ultimately create more personal and visually pleasing social experiences for their audiences.

Once your business has created a Pinterest profile, get the ‘follow’ button for your website so that consumers are encouraged to pin your content and products if they choose. Like all social networks, it’s not simply enough to put the button there though. You need to give users a reason to use it. Interacting with users or giving them useful content that benefits them, beyond what you’re trying to market or sell, will go a long way towards making you more popular on the site. Use this opportunity to build your brand by linking and connecting to people who share the same style or by pinning images that inspire your company’s work. Showcase your style, what makes you different, what your brand stands for and use it as an opportunity to highlight your employees too. Putting a face to your brand is easily done with Pinterest.

Now let’s talk about how your company can utilize this platform to your advantage and drive retail sales.

Improve your click-throughs and spread the word about a new product.

Include your social media campaigns in your emails to build a relationship with your audience. Launch a daily pin theme or have a contest. At a minimum, have links to your Pinterest page in your social sharing section of your email.

Create a daily pin to promote your brand; these usually lead to repeat visitors.

Contests can engage your audience and also get them to your site, browsing your products and linking to them.

When pinning a product, add the product’s price in the description. Doing this will automatically place a banner over the image with the price listed and will also be shown in the gift section of the Pinterest site. This is a way of getting more of a direct response from marketing on Pinterest.

If you’re sending out a weekly newsletter or email, include something like, “See who pinned our products this week” or “Check out which of our products are getting the most attention (pinned) this week by other followers”, in your email linking them to a board you have created showing the results. This is a great way to listen to the customer and show them that you’re listening.

Pinterest’s audience is highly engaged and can easily contribute to your social media campaign going viral. Popular images (with links back to the original source) can get repined on hundreds of other user’s boards. The possibilities with Pinterest are endless. Get on board and start pinning!

Madison Murphy
Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts

Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.	Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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You’ve heard us tout the virtues of email marketing countless times here at WhatCounts. You’ve heard us do the same with social media marketing. So why, you wonder, aren’t your efforts to grow your list working out as well as you want? Why isn’t your audience exploding by leaps and bounds if you’re using social and email together?

The reason why has to do with feedback loops and where you’re aiming your audience-building efforts. In a phenomenal TED talk, Deb Roy, an MIT researcher, explains how content and conversation create feedback loops. Content is noticed by some people, and if they’re influential enough, their conversations about it send more people to look at the content.

Take a look at this diagram:

The blue line represents what Deb speaks about in his talk. Content begets conversation, in a simple feedback loop, the social loop. If your content is compelling enough, audience builds more audience. People share what they like.

What most marketers do with their content is ask for the sale at a certain point, which is a perfectly sensible thing to do. A certain percentage of audience members will buy or start the buying process, and the savvier marketers will present subscribing to an email list as an alternate sale.

Here’s where marketers make a key mistake in their audience-building efforts: they focus their email messaging on the content that subscribers have already seen, as denoted on the chart above, the red line. Someone jumps on your list and you remind them about blog posts they’ve already read or eBooks they’ve already downloaded. For the purposes of building audience, you’re not showing these folks anything new, are you?

What if you instead focused your email messaging (if your goal is to build audience) on growing the conversation rather than recycling eyeballs to your content? What if, instead of aiming people at a blog post or an eBook, you aimed them at a Facebook wall post on your wall where conversation was already happening, and asked people in an email to participate?

You’d effectively be taking your email marketing and instead of using a traditional marketing loop (red line), you’d push your existing audience to the green line (conversation loop).

The logical counterpoint to this idea is, “Well, you’re just pushing them to a conversation about stuff they’ve already seen.” While technically true, the focus is not on the content but the conversation, and with sites like Facebook, participation in the conversation is automatically shared with the network of friends that participants have:

(data from Facebook Insights)

You can see above that 51 people came from the content to distribute it on Facebook. 24,114 saw the content in their newsfeed (per a question at Blogworld, this is actual renders of the content, so if Facebook’s EdgeRank doesn’t show the content to an audience member, it’s not counted as an impresion), and that drove 40 clicks back to the web site. Now imagine taking your list of 100, 1,000, or 1,000,000 and aiming them at the conversation, or aiming them at a landing page with large, prominent Like/Share buttons, and you start to see the incredible power of conversation for building new audience using email marketing and social media together.

If you have a goal of building new audience, adding people to your list, and growing the number of people who are paying attention to you, consider a conversation-targeted campaign as part of your email marketing mix.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Strategy, WhatCounts

Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.	Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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After reading Monday’s post on the Lifecycle Marketing Framework, you might be saying to yourself, “that’s great, but what are some concrete ideas I can use in each step of the framework?” Let’s explore 5 of them very quickly that can help your lifecycle marketing efforts get off the ground.

Acquire: Social Prospecting

Participating in conversations with relevant audience members in social media is one of the fastest ways to acquire new audience. Find relevant hashtags and topics and participate in social channels! Share great content, not just from your company, but also from others. Just since July 1st of this year, the WhatCounts marketing team has grown our primary social media audience on Twitter from around 600 followers to over 10,500.

Convert: Rapid Calls to Action

Social media has changed the game by which people interact with you. Metrics like bounce rate have become highly unreliable because of the way people find your content via social, read it, share it, and then return to their social outlet. In order to turn more of them into prospects, you need to use rapid calls to action. Here’s an example of one of our popups. Since turning these on in August, we’ve seen an increase of 300% in our desired action rate.

Grow: Frequent Email Newsletter

Consumers today are faced with over 5,000 commercial messages per day. In order to stand any chance of your content breaking through that clutter, you need to be re-presenting it frequently. WhatCounts switched from doing a monthly newsletter to a weekly newsletter, the GameChanger, and doubled our email-sourced traffic to our website in the process. More important, we more than tripled our conversions. Consider increasing the frequency of your communications!

Retain: Video and Rich Content

We’ve said over the years that video in email can increase engagement. In the past 4 newsletters we’ve sent, we’ve included video in each one and the result has been a 30% increase in clickthrough rate for our newsletter. Add relevant video to your newsletters and you’ll inform, educate, and entertain, all of which will drive bottom line results.

Reactivate: Organic Retargeting

If you want to win back lost prospects you never knew you lost, organic search retargeting is a great way to do it. The game changer in search retargeting in the last 3 months was Google’s announcement that shared links in social media directly impact search rankings. If you’re connected to WhatCounts socially, when you search for things related to email marketing, you’ll see different results than the general public. With great content and active social media participation, we’ve seen search traffic to WhatCounts triple since Google’s announcement.

We hope these five short ideas for using content marketing to drive results has opened your eyes to ways you can use the Lifecycle Marketing Framework to your advantage.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Strategy, WhatCounts

Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.	Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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The past week or so has seen some amazing, whiplash inducing changes in social media marketing:

• Google+ has opened up to the public and added 10 million new members in less than a week, bringing its total user base to 50 million people. (source)
• Facebook has changed how it displays information on all its user profiles, putting more important items in the news feed and less important items in a ticker.
• Facebook at its developer conference, F8, announced a series of major changes including its new timeline that will display content for a user’s entire life and Open Graph, which makes all applications inherently social.

Marketers would be forgiven for feeling a bit of panic and a sense of being overwhelmed about all of these changes and their vast, far-reaching implications. Email marketers have the added stress of wondering how these new changes in social media will impact subscribers and customers’ interactions with email itself. Allow us to share some insights and things you should be doing as an email marketer to position yourself for the advantage with all of these changes.

Google+

Google+ isn’t so significantly different an animal from other social networks that your practices need to change. Rather, simply incorporate it into your existing social media workflow.

1. There are no corporate pages permitted on Google+ just yet, so in lieu of that, work on having your staff set up individual profiles and promote your content. If you don’t have anyone on staff who is socially savvy, now might be the time to get that rolling. The more that your staff can share and +1 your content, the better it will perform.

Useful and powerful: post a link to your newsletter’s View in Browser version to Google+ when you publish it.

2. Incorporate share and +1 with your network snippets in all of your email content. Even if your email service provider doesn’t allow this, you can use third party services like ShareThis to create links in your email that will allow it to be shared. For WhatCounts clients on the Publicaster platform, Google +1 is built in.

3. Remember to segment out your database and promote Google+ content to anyone with a GMail.com address! Now that Google+ is open to the world, anyone with a GMail account is automatically eligible to participate.

4. With the new document sharing capabilities in Hangouts, consider creating a circle of customers or your top subscribers (by open rate and click through rate), then having a hangout with them to review your email marketing messages for impact and suggestions prior to sending.

Facebook

Facebook’s changes mean that simply “Liking” things will be significantly less impactful. By moving items such as likes to the scrolling news ticker, they’ll be much less visible to friends of friends as they’ll simply pass by.

Conversely, shared stories, links, and content live in the central timeline. As a marketer, getting people to share your content rather than press the Like button is far more important now.

Some things you can do as an email marketer:

1. Ask people to share newsletters on Facebook, rather than using a Like button. Sharing is the new Like.

2. If you want to drive a specific piece of content on Facebook, post a link to it on your wall and then send a followup email to your evangelists, asking them to reshare it on their profiles.

3. When using Share/Like buttons or links in your email newsletters, track who clicks on them and segment them out into a separate list such as socially-savvy subscribers or influencers. You’ll want to be able to reach out to these influencers first any time you need to bring attention to new content or campaigns.

4. If you’ve got a Facebook app, consider having your developers integrate email marketing more tightly into it to encourage usage and participation. Facebook will be promoting the visibility of apps based on their Graph Rank algorithm, which effectively requires marketers to be constantly promoting an app in order for it to be found by Facebook users. By incorporating mechanisms that send email to app users, your app will rank better.

Social media is changing the game rapidly, and these latest network changes from Google and Facebook add additional challenges to your marketing strategies. The one commonality between them is that your email list is now more valuable than ever, as you’ll be able to highlight how you’re adapting to changes in social media to your subscribers.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Strategy, WhatCounts

Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.	Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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