As you know, Email, Facebook and Twitter are what everyone is doing  online right now.  See this post about the state of social media in New Zealand.  And, the role of marketing is to increase the consumers’ propensity to buy something from you.

So, how do the most popular online activities influence the likelihood that you will sell something?

Recent market reports (linked below) show that consumers who engage with you on Email and Twitter are more likely to buy from you than those who don’t.

As you can see from the graph here, although the Twitter user is more likely to ‘agree’, the balance at neutral is the same.  So if we assume that neutral means they are more or less likely to buy, we’ll call them equal.   The influence of Facebook drags behind a little.

One reason for that difference might be that when someone makes you a Facebook ‘fan’ or ‘friend’, they are already likely to buy from you.  Hence the act of being a fan doesn’t INCREASE their likelihood to buy.

So whilst email and Twitter are equal, Twitter is still a tiny minority of consumers – especially b2c ones (approx 6%) … so clearly email is still your best bet for developing relationships that lead to sales.

As you’ve seen in earlier posts, Jericho is talking with many of our clients about the place that share with your network (SWYN) has in the email campaign. Many of these clients, and wider business in general, have not implemented an active social media strategy yet – no bustling Facebook pages, no Twitter account, and sometimes a blog that’s mostly dead! For these clients especially, as well as making it easy for your customers share their favourite bits of your campaigns, SWYN is a great way to use social media without having to have your own company pages.

In good email, like all direct marketing, it’s important to think about your aims and make sure you have a clear message with the right calls to action, in each communication. You have to balance that with the ‘real estate’ available in your email too of course. Do you use the premium areas for ‘friending’ or for selling?

Friend get friend is still a great strategy. It’s aims are different – it is asking people to recommend others who should be a part of your email marketing communications database(s). As you know continually growing your email database is critical as the list naturally ‘churns’ over time, and as the email channel is much more powerful in terms of getting ‘permission’ to talk to as many people as possible is critical! One thing that is showing up loud and clear is that subscribers need to be bribed or rewarded quite a lot to bother to ‘share’ invites, and rewarding the invitees equally, is important too.

It also needs to be balanced with the legal ‘grey area’ around refer a friend or friend get friend read more including our most popular post ever, on that here.

As I said, Email, Facebook and Twitter offer unique strengths to marketers and consumers alike.

There has been a lot of great research recently on how each channel affects the recipients propensity to purchase:

How Effective Is Sharing via Email vs. Social Media?
Users still sharing by email
Fans, Followers or Subscribers – how do you meet their needs?

One thing is for sure that this is a dynamic area and it’s a moving target requiring part a lot art, part a ton science!

To read our weekly blog posts for the most comprehensive posts on emarketing, and email marketing in New Zealand, click the JERICHO logo at the top of the post here, and pick through the menu on the right hand side, or use the Search box.