Business Executives Integrating Social Media into Email "Don't Know Where to Start"

Business executives have big plans on where they'll be putting their budget dollars in 2010. According to a new survey by StrongMail, business executives plan to push their new budgets toward email marketing (69% respondents), social media (59% respondents), and SEO (42% respondents). 

Even though email and social media integration is a trend that has been growing for some time now, the chart below absolutely confirms the vast room for improvement and growth.

While nearly half of respondents have formulated (or integrated) a strategy that incorporates social media into their company’s email campaigns already, 18% of respondents who have yet to implement an integrated email & social media strategy say they’d like to, but have no idea where to start.

Interestingly, out of the 27% of respondents who claim to have already integrated social media into their email marketing strategy, thirty-five percent are reporting no improvement in their campaign performance. Even more shocking is that 23% of companies currently using social media in their email campaigns still do not know how to measure their results.

Some of the data above conflicts with our own experience here at HubSpot. Back in June, when our Convert guru Ellie Mirman blogged about Why Your Email Needs Social Media (and How to Do It Right), she reported that  “since integrating social media more into our email campaigns, we've seen an uptick in the (1) number of mentions in social media (specifically for our webinars or other email content), (2) number of subscribers to our social media profiles, and (3) amount of traffic and leads from social media sites (for this lead generation type of content) due to that buzz on these sites."

I suspect that the reason many companies are not seeing improvement is a lack of knowledge about how to measure their integrated social media and email marketing campaigns effectively.

Quick Tips on How to Measure Integrated Email & Social Media Campaigns

The data that I find most disturbing is the number of worldwide companies who are implementing social media campaigns without clear ideas on how to measure their results.

Use a "Tweet It" Button and Measure the Clicks and Distance Your Tweet Travels

One way  you can track qualitative results is by using a “Tweet It” button in your emails. You can set your “Tweet It” button’s pre-prepared text. This is the lazy-tweet that your twitterers can share with their network.  By searching for the text of this pre-prepared text on Twitter Search or other tools, you can see how far your text has traveled. You can also measure the success of this button using quantitative metrics (supplied by your email provider) that report how many people have clicked on the “Tweet It” button.  

Monitor Shared Links with a Bit.ly Account 

You can also measure the success of your social media campaign by creating a Bit.ly account. Bit.ly is a free link shortener that can help you track how many times people have shared your link via Twitter and other social networks. Place your Bit.ly links in the pre-prepared text of your “Tweet It” Button.

Use Analytics Provided By Your Email Provider

Any email service provider will track clicks for you, too – so you can see how many people click on your social media buttons on your email. This way you’ll be able to discover which Social Media sites you want to incorporate into your emails and where they most like to share your information online.

One bit of warning however when choosing your email provider. Many of them now offer the built in social media share links on their ESP. While helpful, these buttons can prevent you from accessing important analytics that may be important to articulating the value of social media in your campaigns.

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