The From Line

Marketing Trend:

Social media sharing has given marketers a treasure chest of insight into customer opinions and discussions. But tools that measure social media sentiment have their limits. The human element, such as the use of slang, can throw off reports.

This week's trend discusses better ways to be engaging while gaining feedback and valuable marketing data.

Trend:

The trend of using “Social CRM” for marketing is probably more myth than reality. People are talking about rounding out customer profiles with social data, but is anything actually happening to prove ROI? 

Social media management tools can be useful at managing outbound messages, and deferring inbound messages to customer service. Social media management tools can be useful at managing outbound messages, and deferring inbound messages to customer service. These tools are available for free (Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, Gist) or via subscription (Sprout Social, Involver, Vitrue).

What’s emerging now is the belief that marketers, not customer service reps, need to capture as much publicly-available social data on their customers and dump it into their databases. But the value is still TBD. And as online privacy issues continue to take shape, thus limiting easily-accessible social data, can simply knowing that a customer is on Facebook help to effectively engage prospects in a real way?

TAKEAWAY

“Social CRM”  might be  just a case  of “all  sizzle and  no steak.”  In other  words,  marketers  have  convinced  other  marketers  they need  the stuff,  but there  isn’t much  substance.

Marketing Trend

Our trendwatchers are seeing a growing need for even the savviest of marketers to educate themselves on workflow improvements. The concept of how to mass-produce automated marketing campaigns (without reliance on excessive human interaction) is not difficult to implement, yet many businesses aren’t aware of the right strategies. Furthermore, while the cost of marketing mediums has decreased due to the rapid growth of online advertising opportunities, production costs have skyrocketed. This leaves marketing budgets vulnerable to what our experts call The 21st Century Marketing Paradox – a cost shift from channel to production. 

I know it has been a while since I posted something (we all had such a busy summer) and I've been meaning to update this with thoughts on how clients can improve their campaigns. I'll continue to share my ideas here. This particular post is about Google Analytics -- something that is simple to set up, free, and enhances your investment in email marketing programs.

After conducting some research it became apparent that many emarketers are using web analytics for their websites, but few are integrating it with email. It really is a shame -- Google Analytics is free and it provides great insight into your email campaigns effectiveness.

If you’re not using web analytics with email you might find the info below very helpful. If you are, kudos to you! Let me know if I missed anything below.

In order to get the most out of email/web analytics you need to move beyond basic visits, page views, and other standard measures and customize your reporting to generate a better understanding of subscriber behavior and how it leads to revenue.

Here are some questions to consider:

Gold Lasso's eLoop allows users to integrate Google Analytics with campaigns. First, sign up for a free Google Analytics account and follow our simple instructions (We emailed the steps to all eLoop users a few months ago. Let us know if you have any questions about how to do it.)