There is a large disconnect between when major retailers conduct social media and e-mail marketing campaigns and when they receive the most engagement, according to a new report from Yesmail Interactive, Portland, Ore.
Analyzing campaigns of 20 major retailers over a three-month period, the Yesmail research discovered that:
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Facebook campaigns achieve the highest level of activity on Tuesdays, yet that day is fourth in terms of when campaigns are deployed.
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Twitter campaigns generally take place on Friday, which is the least engaging day in terms of retweets.
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Most interaction on YouTube occurs on Monday, but it is the least utilized weekday for campaigns.
“Companies have too many organizational silos, each of which schedules things to run,” said Mike Fisher, Yesmail president. “There is no coordination between e-commerce, social media monitoring and marketing. Often it’s a situation when messages are organized around the company, not around the customers.”
So a campaign that might use e-mail and Facebook, for example, might send out the e-mail at one time of the day and the Facebook campaign much later, with each message having a different look and feel. Similarly, other aspects of a campaign might go out on Thursday, but the Twitter aspect, handled by another silo within the marketing department, might not go out until Friday.
Fisher added that the quick rise of social media led companies to “throw people at it,” leading to the different marketing silos and the campaign disconnects.
According to Fisher, a customer’s social engagement can grow with a company every time it sends out an e-mail campaign, if e-mail and social media marketing are coordinated.
Companies need to realize that their social media and e-mail marketing isn’t conducted in a vacuum. Competitors use these channels as well. So the success of any marketing campaign needs to be measured against the company’s own expectations, but also against the success or lack thereof of competitors’ campaigns.
According to the report, “Engagement is not about the quantity of your followers, but the quality of your interaction with them.”
In that vein, companies can improve their interactions with customers by breaking down marketing silos so that campaigns are well coordinated, Fisher said. This is especially true when considering aspects of any campaign that are packed with consumer-facing messages. For example Facebook has over 90 million active users. So the timing of the message is important along with the message itself to make sure that it rises above the noise of other messages, Fisher said.
Yesmail found that the campaigns that worked best communicated purpose by identifying desired customer behavior, had an incentive for performing a specific action and empowered the customers by putting them in charge.
The research showed that campaigns deployed between 10 a.m. and noon ET resulted in the best engagement, yet this timeslot was the least utilized for deployment. The most popular deployment time was between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET, but this timeslot was in the bottom 30 percent in terms of engagement. There is a similar disconnect in the best daily results and the most popular days for running Facebook campaigns.
Facebook and other social media campaigns work much better if the marketing silos are eliminated and the social media campaigns and e-mail campaigns complement one another, according to Fisher. The Yesmail research showed that Facebook engagement grew by 50 percent when a complementary e-mail campaign was deployed and by 200 percent when two complementary e-mails were deployed.
To improve social media and e-mail marketing results, Fisher recommended:
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Understand the customer and how to communicate messages to them across different channels.
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Make sure the message is clear.
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Don’t react to all the noise; identify what is meaningful in any feedback.
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Measure not just how effective a social media and e-mail marketing campaign is for the company, but also measure it against the campaigns of competitors.
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Identifying opportunities to remove silos in the organization – customers don’t care about a company’s barriers, “they want you to tell them that they are loyal customers.”
Click here to download the full report from Yesmail.com.