The From Line

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. 

If your email marketing system transmits email in MIME format how do you know what format (HTML or Text) your recipients are reading?  Most systems will calculate open rates however this is only regulated for HTML formats.  In addition most systems will calculate clicks however they do not distinguish between a text click or HTML click.

If you're fortunate enough to have an email service provider like Gold Lasso that calculates unique opens and unique clicks that distinguishes between HTML and text formats you can easily calculate a rough distribution between the two.

Here are the formulas:

HTML format = Number of recipients who requested HTML formats + (Unique Opens - Number of recipients who requested HTML formats)

Text format = Number of recipients who requested text formats + (Unique Text Clicks - Number of recipients who requested text formats)

MIME Format = Number of transmissions - (HTML format + Text format)

The reason why you need to subtract the number of recipients who requested a specific format from the Unique stat is because you do not want to count them twice.

Hint:  Over time if you see your text versions start to increase it is probably because your recipients are reading your email from a mobile device.  Many of our B2B clients are observing the text stat increase.