What is a contact strategy? A contact strategy is a marketing program that sends appropriate messages to relevant groups of customers according to a strategic schedule.

Who needs a contact strategy? Any brand that is serious about using a particular channel to generate income.

Most brands that live or die through direct marketing understand the importance of a contact strategy. Brands that rely heavily on the postal channel tend to focus on building an effective contact strategy because of the high costs of paper, printing, and postage. Yet I’ve seen that many brands that use email and social media to reach their customers don’t focus much on creating a disciplined contact strategy. This is a huge mistake. It is the difference between a random shot gun approach and a scientifically engineered process. Which do you think will produce the results you want?

Having a direct response background, I look at social media as the latest generation direct marketing channel. I use social media’s predecessors–email and postal messaging–as models for designing a strategy. I’ll show you what I mean.

Learning from catalog brands

When I worked in the print catalog world, we focused heavily on RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) in determining who received a catalog when. In other words, the time of the customer’s last purchase, how often they purchased, and how much they spent drove our decisions on which customers we should invest marketing dollars on. These indicators were so reliable you would be willing to bet on them.

Email response indicators

In our email strategies for clients, we add another component to this model. We bring into the equation when the customer last opened or clicked on an email message. Although email is a low cost channel, you can do harm to your list and leave sales dollars on the table without this kind of approach.

Designing social media contact strategies

I like to think of Inner Architect as being a pioneer in developing contact strategies for the social media channel. Here are some things you should consider in creating a more disciplined approach to your social marketing program:

• Do you know which of your customers are on Facebook and/or Twitter?
• Do you know which customers like your brand or follow you?
• Are you keeping track of who is engaging with you and when?
• How often do you want to reach out and to whom?
• What can you establish for measurement?

This is exciting new territory! Please don’t hesitate to contact me if I can answer any questions.

The SocialMediaToday.com article “Twitter in a Corner- Facing Huge Challenges” is an interesting piece about Twitter’s goals to monetize and survive an uncertain future. Twitter’s baby steps into advertising and their deliberate roll out strategy are the initial focus. The piece correctly identifies Twitter’s great concern to preserve the user experience, the possible alienation of users due to the new advertising initiatives, and the ongoing need to monetize the business model.

Twitter’s Future: Abandoning the Network?

Author Robert Bacal makes three assertions that essentially outline a scenario that we do not believe to be completely true:

• “With 80% of user accounts abandoned, can Twitter afford to move away from it’s social community roots in order to monetize its operation?”

• “Can it (Twitter) hit the critical balancing point where it can maintain its user base, attract more users while using user eyeballs to generate money? It’s unlikely. There is a point where the commercial use will drive social and community users out of the space, or to competitors, and that reality, or at least possibility limits the revenue potential.“

• “At the same time, there is the issue of commercialization from third party sources who aren’t paying anything for the free advertising they get from simply dumping tweets into the stream. They damage the user experience for those who are not there to buy things, the majority of users, and they don’t drive any revenue at all for Twitter.”

Twitter’s Future: Counterpoint

• Abandonment: according to Bacal “80% of Twitter accounts are abandoned.” This is neither surprising nor alarming news because Twitter is a micro-blogging platform. If we look at the history of blogging’s attrition rates, there is a definite correlation. Simply put, blogosphere has survived and many bloggers have monetized despite attrition (abandonment) rates equal to or more than Twitter’s current rate of account abandonment.
• Commercial use: the claim that commercial use will drive away users is unfounded. In my opinion, commercial use will begin to attract more users not drive them away from Twitter. In tandem with Foursquare, Twitter will be the “offer platform” consumers will flock to in order to find the best deals on products and services.
• Choice: the thought that user experience is damaged by people or companies “dumping tweets into the stream” that either promote or advertise something is no different than the 50 years worth of television or radio advertising we have endured. We as users understand that we can ignore the tweets that promote or advertise because the network’s value outweighs the possible “littered stream.”

More Reasons Why People Will Continue to Adopt

• Research: according to a 2006 quote from Evan Williams: “What we have to do is deliver to people the best and freshest most relevant information possible. We think of Twitter as it’s not a social network, but it’s an information network. It tells people what they care about as it is happening in the world.” Twitter remains one of the most vibrant and important resources for information on the internet and the fastest growing search engine with more monthly search queries than Yahoo and Bing- combined!
• Entertainment Value: Twitter has a plethora of celebrities, sports stars, business magnates, and other very interesting people and brands. It is the platform to learn about people and brands. No amount of commercialization will drive people away from the tidbits of gossip, insider information, and breaking news Twitter has to offer.

Inner Architect

SearchEnginePeople.com

We are proud to announce our acceptance as guest contributors to SearchEnginePeople.com Canada’s “largest and most trusted Internet marketing company.” Search Engine People services 300 clients worldwide including many of Canada’s top brands. President and CEO Jeff Quipp and blog Editor Ruud Hein are the driving forces behind SearchEnginePeople’s blog.

Inner Architect Features on SearchEnginePeople.com

• Susan Hanshaw’s “Measure Your Marketing Efforts: Capture and Create Keycodes” June 24, 2010
• Dean Guadagni’s “5 Reasons Your Company May Never Adopt Twitter” July 5, 2010
• Susan Hanshaw’s “Measure Social Media Lifetime Sales ROI” July 15, 2010
• Dean Guadagni’s “Twitter as Direct Marketing Channel: 2 List Building Steps to ROI” July 16, 2010

In 1 Simple Ingredient for All Your ROI Needs, I discussed using a key code system to track the performance of individual social media efforts. While this practice is a great step towards tracking the sales performance of the social media channel, it is not enough if you truly want to learn how your social relationships are influencing sales in the long term.

What does it mean to measure impact on long term sales?

Think about it this way. Evaluating long term impact means there is going to be a starting point, a building up of history, and then a point where you measure what has happened since the starting point.

Starting point: Date of first sale

Building of history: Transactions made over a period of time

Measurement point: Recording cumulative sales that have occurred since the date of first sale

How do you apply this analysis to social media?

The goal here is to look at the buying history of the customers you have social relationships with versus those you don’t.  This requires that you:

1. Identify which customers are Facebook fans and/or Twitter followers.
2. Append this information to your customer database or marketing database for future reference.
3. Segment your database into  groups based upon relationship.
4. Further segment your groups into months or quarters based on first sale date.

In the example above, sales to Twitter followers is 14 points higher than average and 20 points higher than customers where there is no social relationship.  To fully load this analysis to get a total ROI, you would need to load in the costs associated with social media. I’ll save this discussion for a future post. Please leave a comment or email me if you have any questions in the meantime.

In the couple of years that I have been involved with social media marketing, I have seen much correlation between what what works for driving engagement and what works to drive a direct marketing response. I have become convinced that there is one area of focus that is sorely overlooked by brands seeking to build a vibrant and constantly growing Facebook community. There lacks an attention to the influence of copy.

Over the years I have pushed hundreds of millions of offers out to consumers and learned that what drives response holds true to the old folk wisdom—

“It’s not what you say, but how you say it.”

I have seen numerous tests where a different set of words or something else said or not said can produce a variance that can amount to a huge pile of cash to the bottom line.

Translating this idea to today’s social media world, most Facebook marketers haven’t quite realized that the Wall is a vehicle for generating response and that post copy should be formulated with care. Don’t let the real-time nature of the platform fool you into thinking that your messages should not require some planning.

5 tips for writing effective Facebook updates:

1. Speak to your fans in a style that makes them feel like you are addressing them individually. Develop the message to read like you were speaking 1:1.
2. Keep it short. No more than 4 lines in the post wherever possible. Make every word play a role in the message. Eliminate those that don’t.
3. Say something designed to inspire enthusiasm or emotion. Keep in mind that many Facebook users are hunting for posts to like and comment. Give them a reason to stop at yours.
4. Create sentences that flow smoothly. Awkward wording can lead to abandoned eyes.
5. Always have a photo or a link with an image attached to the post. Pictures are more engaging and heart-inspiring than flat text.

I’d love to hear any tips you have to add!

In our conversations with potential clients,

Think about it this way. Your goal with social media is to build relationships that positively influence customers’ lifetime purchasing with your brand. Rather than look to social media to make the sale, leverage your social media relationships to influence sales in email, postal or telesales efforts. By doing so, you:

• Personalize the outreach
• Strengthen the relationship
• Increase the potential to make a sale

Let’s face it. Facebook and Twitter have changed our culture. Customers who engage with your brand on Facebook or Twitter want to be recognized. If you are not sending those customers personalized messages that acknowledge your Facebook or Twitter relationship, you miss the opportunity to leverage the social relationship. You defeat the whole purpose of social media by sending messages that are not personalized.

We are recommending strategies that segment customers into targeted groups that enable you to send relevant messages. This level of  segmentation also helps you to capitalize on opportunities to outreach when purchasing history indicates a likeliness to buy.

Want to learn more? We’d love to hear from you.

One of the greatest, untapped, benefits of Twitter is the list building feature. Segmentation and advanced Recency-Frequency-Monetary analysis can only begin when you build lists. Considering that Twitter is quickly becoming a sales and marketing channel the equal of traditional channels like postal-email-phone, it is time for businesses to create lists of their prospective and current consumers that choose Twitter as a channel for communication. Building Twitter lists begin with two steps:

1. Identify Your Customers & Prospects on Twitter

• Email Addresses: extract and build a list of the email addresses of your customers from your database
• Data Append: utilizing your list of customer email addresses, contract a data append service to find the social network (Facebook-Twitter-LinkedIn) url addresses of customers who have adopted Twitter and other networks
• Data Search: use Google or Twitter Search to input keywords or names of your customers. Example- Google search “Dean Guadagni on Twitter” or “Dean Guadagni: Twitter.com” to find Dean Guadagni’s Twitter url aka handle
• Prospect Search: input keywords that will identify real time conversations on Twitter relevant to your business. Record the Twitter url of each prospective customer and build a list of these prospects

2.  Build Twitter Lists

• Customer List: build a master list of the customers you currently service who communicate on Twitter. Note- Lock this list for your eyes only so that no competitor can view the list
• Segment: from the master “Customer List” segment your customers into different lists such as location, clients, prospects, most active purchasers, etc.
• Engage: send a tweet to your customer or prospect bundled around an offer to entice them to follow your Twitter account if they are not following

Benefits

• New Touch Points: identifying customers and prospects who use Twitter provides businesses a new place to communicate and deliver offers
• Database Enrichment: adding social media information to  your database increases the value of your database
• Measurement & Analysis: building Twitter lists is the first step in creating a measurement strategy that will allow you to analyze the effectiveness of Twitter as a sales and marketing channel for your business

Facebook and Twitter share  synergy as “must have” business tools for today’s marketing and sales efforts. Facebook is often used as a CRM for businesses and Twitter a prospecting funnel to move people to a Facebook page. With this in mind, how do you cross market and provide exposure for a company Facebook page using Twitter? Answer: hashtag events.

Hashtag Events On Twitter

#FollowFriday and niche hashtag events have provided participants with exposure, viral marketing power, new followers, and recognition. The next step in hashtags should be the creation of an event called #FacebookFri. Inner Architect has announced #FacebookFri with the intention of creating a new event with the same viral power of #FollowFri.

How Does #FacebookFri Work?

#FacebookFri provides Twitter users an opportunity to recommend their favorite Facebook business pages to their Twitter following and other Twitter users:

• Friday: although competing with #FF, the idea is to feed off of #FF traffic much the same way TV networks use strong shows to provide “lead in” audience to their new shows
• Hashtag: each tweet must include the hashtag #FacebookFri to join the event
• Link: capture the url address of the Facebook page you wish to recommend and include it in your tweet

What Are The Benefits of #FacebookFri?

• Exposure: by naming your favorite Facebook pages you are providing exposure for that page
• Friendsourcing: friendsourcing, known by many other names, works like this: by naming your favorite Facebook pages you are providing your stamp of approval. Friends have a greater tendency to adopt other friend’s recommendations
• Viral Marketing: when you recommend a Facebook page you are moving the link for that page into the Twitter stream of your followers and possible new followers
• Networking: #FacebookFri would help other Facebook page owners meet their peers, connect, network, and form possible alliances
• Lead Generation: #FacebookFri would be a prime activity to generate more traffic to your Facebook page enhancing the possibility of new leads for a business owner

Let’s face it. While social media is the trendy new marketing kid on the block, email remains the channel that most companies rely upon to execute their direct marketing programs. Why?

• Email is easy and inexpensive.
• Social media is new and time-consuming.

Many marketers make the mistake of assuming that since email is cheap, there’s no harm in blasting the whole database with the same message. Yet this strategy produces an unhealthy syndrome called list fatigue. Without a strategy for sending the most relevant messages to the most targeted customers, your emails can begin to be perceived as irrelevant and your customers stop opening them. If your customers shut down your only touch point, you lose your ability to communicate with them and increase the likelihood of losing them. Not good.

This is where social media can play the hero. Social networks give you another channel in which to get your customer’s attention. By making the effort to maintain social network contact information on your database, consider the power of what you can do:

• Best customers: Show them that you care by acknowledging them in a social relationship.
• New customers: Get the relationship off to the most promising start by welcoming them to a social relationship.
• Lapsed customers: Seize the opportunity to re-engage those who are no longer responding to your emails.

Are you thinking this sounds too time-consuming and something you can’t afford? Think about it this way. Back in the day direct marketers spent tons of money on four-color printing on high quality paper. But they didn’t mail these expensive pieces to everyone. They only invested in the people they predicted were most likely to buy or those they sorely did not want to lose.

This is the kind of science that now needs to be applied to social media marketing. How prepared are you?

Last week we met with a small retail business whose direct sales dollars depends heavily on direct marketing efforts. We were on the topic of email marketing and I learned that they had never done any testing. I described the concept of A/B testing, and while they understood the potential value, they perceived it as “too complicated”.

Trust me on this one. Over the course of a 20+ year career, I’ve tested pricing, lists, subject lines, offer copy, packages, creative, engagement devices, premiums, even stamps! Here’s what I learned:

1. Slight variances in performance can easily add up to tens of thousands of dollars. Over the course of time, a better performing effort can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
2. There is psychology involved in motivating a customer or prospect to buy. Testing enables you to learn about what works and what doesn’t, which can lead you to develop your own theories that guide you moving forward.

Where should you test? Every channel where you are delivering marketing messages should be considered fertile testing grounds. Despite popular fallacies, you can measure ROI on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Tips for testing:

• Keep your laboratory as clean as possible. Make sure you’re comparing apples to apples with regards to list and delivery times. Any variances between the two samples will fuzzy your results.
• Create test panels of equal size in channels which allow for list segmentation.
• Think in terms of having a “control” and “test panels”, with your goal always to beat your control to increase your sales.

Let me close now by passing on my mantra: Always be testing!