Editorial Articles

Google has become the first major brand to fail in its attempt to integrate email with emerging media channels, following the collapse of its Google Wave application.

Although aimed at the consumer market, Google Wave’s collapse raises questions on how businesses looking to integrate email and emerging channels will be affected. Social media has experienced a stratospheric rise, but is this collapse an indication that integrating email and social media for marketing strategy is doomed? Absolutely not.

Email is a common thread that connects every touch-point in the customer’s lifecycle, but to build effective customer relationships brands must first understand how it affects channels like social networks and mobile. A recent report from Forrester Research finds that "given the increasing complexity of the email marketing channels – including the need to integrate email with social and mobile channel – the call for strategic guidance will only continue to grow in importance."

Utilising strategic guidance, when leveraging emerging channels such as social media, can be the key to establishing a meaningful bond with the customer. Examples of strategic guidance now available include listening and monitoring services; lifecycle communications frameworks; email and social media campaign tools and execution services; community management services; analytics and loyalty marketing programmes.

As an example, better strategic guidance would enable companies to start thinking about how to identify their best customers, who research suggests represent 20 percent of a customer base but account for 80 percent of sales, and create unique, special experiences for them.

As part of this strategy companies must:

Listen
Listen to and understand the conversations customers are having and, specifically, what they're saying about your brand. Insights gained through listening can often identify a shared passion (be it travel, sports, music, etc.) that's essential in engaging best customers for ongoing conversations.

Learn
Conduct some proprietary research across your best customers to understand how they use the social web, which will inform your segmentation and marketing strategy further. This research will also be critical in developing new social programmes that appeal specifically to your key segments.

Engage
Build a truly unique experience for these customers, leveraging all touch points: website, email, customer service desk and presence on social networks. Take the time and effort to build a lifecycle communication programme for every segment, paying attention to community management. Rethink your loyalty programmes — perhaps shift your focus from promotions to rewarding best customers for participating with your brand — be it their community contributions, social network activity or brand advocacy.

Influence
Leverage social tools to facilitate and encourage sharing and brand advocacy. Flag and thank active customers, and reward them for their advocacy.

The greatest benefit of focusing on your best customers is the ability to manage and execute based on the data. Amazing things begin to emerge when you not only know who your best customers are, what segment they fall in, what products they like and how often they use them, but also their email activity, loyalty/purchase activity and social activity.

While many companies “listen” and “learn” few leverage the data they capture to “engage” and “influence. Leading brands must learn to create this bond and to utilise the strategic guidance, creativity and tools necessary to build relationships and drive brand advocacy. It is through leveraging the data and insights gained from marketing activities to build more relevant conversations, that results can be achieved.

The use of social media will continue to grow, and the collapse of Google Wave is not an indication that this growth is slowing. It is simply a failed product experiment from a company we are not used to failure. Stay the course in integrating email with emerging channels to strengthen customer relationships; do not be distracted by the hype that is bound to follow failure of the Wave.

Ryan Deutsch
VP, Emerging Channels, ThreadMarketing, a StrongMail Company