Social Media User To Paying Customer

Ultimately, marketing is about making sales. Brand recognition and engagement are simply aspects of revenue generation, but in the end, you want to convert people from users who engage with your brand via social media to paying customers.

Why Social Media

Social media marketing takes the relationship marketing theory to a new level. One of the keys to marketing is to build a solid relationship with the customer, and relationship marketing proposes that the customer-business interactions cannot be focused on the final sale. If they address the consumer’s interests and needs, then the brand loyalty and sales will come naturally.

Social media gives your company a platform to create these human relationships. It’s an opportunity for your company to be transparent and relatable. Use your social networks to humanize your company; let people see the soul of the company. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are not the best place to offer advertorial messages or coupons. This is where you explain the passion and social goals of your business and encourage the consumer to engage.

The Marketing Newsletter

One marketing avenue you can offer via social media is the company newsletter. The newsletter serves a special place in the conversion process—it is for people who want to increase their knowledge on a subject. Newsletters need to be full of topic-specific (usually industry-specific) information. Do not use the newsletter to give general information about your company, and remember that these are not update or feel-good pieces (that’s what your social media is for).

Take a hard look at your goals for your newsletter, and tailor the format and content to reach these goals. Are you trying to increase the number of leads? Better qualify people to speak to your sales team? Keep the customers you have? Gather your answers and create a plan of action.

Best Practices

Don’t just throw together a generic newsletter and hope it sticks, however. Follow these best practices so you’re not wasting your time (and theirs):

• Write for the Web. Craft clear, concise and grammatically correct content that’s relevant and compelling for your intended audience. Meet Content has a comprehensive list of writing guidelines that’s helpful.
• Go for “the ask.” Include a call to action in your newsletter. Tell readers what you want them to do, whether that’s to sign up for your service, call you or buy your product. Kuno Creative offer six simple tips to creating a strong call for action.
• Make it easy for them to pay you. Create a streamlined payment process that offers your users-turned-customers payment flexibility. Chargify offers subscription management services that enables customers to upgrade from one plan to another, download statements and access a self-service help portal.
• Hire a professional designer. Or, use an email newsletter service like MailChimp. The last thing you want to do is send out an amateurish newsletter—no one will take you seriously.

Author: Scriptable Solutions, LLC
Reference: Pixel Productions Inc.

5 Essential Topics Every Email Marketer Should Understand

What I've come to realize is that in today's digital marketing world, it's very rare that an email marketer gets this kind of background. And I don't mean in print, I mean in email. I commonly come across email marketers who don't know how the channel that is the basis of our livelihood works. Here then are my top five things that every email marketer should know.

1. How Email Is Delivered

I believe every email marketer should know how this works, how their message actually gets delivered, from the basics of mail servers and DNS through to the SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) transport and delivery of email.

It may seem technical and irrelevant to marketers, but this is important knowledge because it has a significant impact in a wide range of areas. Spam filtering depends on and impacts this process. To understand blocking and filtering, the difference between an RBL and a URIBL means understanding this process. To understand what bounce codes and responses mean and how they impact your delivery requires understanding of this process.

2. How Email Is Displayed

HTML (hypertext markup language) is the language of email. The HTML dialect for email is different to that for websites. The capabilities and limitations in regards to email are important and becoming more so. The growth of mobile and adoption of mobile-first and responsive designs change how our messages look and why. Every email marketer should understand what can and can't be done, what should and should not be done, why content displays differently on different platforms, and how responsive design works.

3. Basic Statistics

Email is a data-driven medium. Unfortunately, all too often email marketers come from non-mathematical backgrounds and never learned these basics. We receive a deluge of data about our programs and campaigns. What often surprises me, though, is how little that data gets used. Top-line metrics such as delivery, open, and click rates are compared month on month but often there's little more than that.

Simply knowing what makes a test good and a result statistically significant is invaluable. Effective use of the available data can make the difference between a good program and a great one.

4. Privacy and Security

As I wrote back in February, email marketers are handling a growing quantity of data and increasingly make essential decisions about collection, storage, transfer, and use of that data. Every email marketer needs to be up on both privacy and security and how it impacts what we do every single day.

There is often a significant disconnect between the policy and the practice of data privacy and security. Understanding the fundamentals, the whys, and wherefores removes that disconnect and enables email marketers to make smart decisions even when the privacy group is not around.

5. Direct Marketing Fundamentals

Email marketers come from a range of backgrounds and email is such an effective channel that it seems oftentimes we can get away with ignoring marketing fundamentals and still get great return on investment (ROI). But even though it's a unique channel, email marketing is still direct marketing and the fundamentals are important.

The four Ps of Product, Price, Place, and Promotion and the three Ms of Market, Message, and Medium are still very relevant foundations to effective marketing in the age of the fragmented customer journey, the mobile consumer, and cross-channel messaging.

I want to be clear that I'm not saying email marketers should know how to write a mail server, be HTML coding wizards, or Ph.D. statisticians. We are doing data-driven marketing with email and an understanding of the fundamental aspects of data, marketing, and email are important. Without these fundamentals we're in no position to have serious discussions about the subtleties and nuances of email strategies and tactics. Instead, we'll be continually rehashing the same conversations and readdressing the same misconceptions.

Publisher: Scriptable Solutions
Source: http://www.scriptablesolutions.com/article.cfm?ArticleNumber=68