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Chris Lovejoy is a Senior Email Strategist for StrongMail. Chris has more than 15 years experience in global hospitality marketing and digital communications, most recently as principal of The Email Advisor, a respected email marketing consultancy focused on email strategy and channel optimization. Previously, Chris worked with Premiere Global Services, providing eMarketing and technical strategy to its largest clients. Chris also served as global marketing and electronic communications manager at Preferred Hotel Group and held several other account management and senior sales positions in advertising and hospitality.

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Wonder Twins: Email and Social Media Marketing

Written on
Feb 25, 2010 
Author
Chris Lovejoy  |
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Wonder Twins: Email and Social Media Marketing

wonder_smallADOTAS – There have been a lot of stories about using social media to increase brand awareness and customer retention, but little attention has been paid to its potential to acquire new customers, especially when used in conjunction with a proven channel like email.

Driving awareness with social media is great, but marketers’ ability to monetize social media will ultimately determine whether or not it becomes a viable direct marketing channel. In fact, 72% of CMO’s who didn’t track social media investments to revenue in 2009 plan to do so in 2010, according to a recent study by the Baazarvoice and The CMO Club.

More important, these same CMOs are looking to replace social marketing metrics that focus solely on web goals (traffic, page views, fans) with metrics like conversion, revenue, and average order value that track to the bottom line. Determining how to deliver against these metrics is important, and personal financial service Mint.com was able to do just that.

Launched in 2007, Mint.com is the number one online personal finance site in the United States. They achieved that goal by taking a fresh approach to helping people manage their money. By making it very easy for users to create a summary of their spending habits, build a budget and monitor performance against personal financial goals, Mint.com filled a niche left unfilled by more complicated and involved solutions. Not only did Mint.com gain members at a rapid pace, they attracted individuals who were passionate about the service.

Even though the company’s growth was stellar by anyone’s standards, the company recognized the valuable resource it had in its enthusiastic customer base to accelerate growth through referrals. Consequently, Mint.com began looking at the most effective ways to implement a dynamic referral program and quickly decided to combine the efficiency of email with the viral nature of social media.

Mint.com was already using email to communicate with its members, so it turned to this proven channel to deliver a viral referral campaign to its active members. Mint.com used a platform called StrongMail Influencer to create a compelling and interactive experience that enabled its members to easily refer Mint.com to their social networks. The platform also enabled Mint.com to identify the key social influencers within their CRM database and save that segment for future re-marketing efforts.

When building out their campaign strategy, Mint.com first conducted some research to determine what types of offers would motivate their target audience to spread the word. Their marketing team ran an A/B test to a small segment of their overall target list offering them one of three different offers.

All three social programs asked recipients to share their positive experience with Mint.com by referring their friends. The email creative for each test was the same, only the test offer was different.

The first test offered the opportunity to win a “Minty Green” iPod Nano once three of their friends became Mint.com users. The second offered exclusive access to the Mint.com Beta Testing Program, also in exchange for three new users signing up. The third test served as a control group offering no reward, but still asking recipients to invite their friends to become members.

Of the three offers tested, exclusive access to the Mint.com Best Test Program was the clear winner.

Mint.com launched the tests and then tracked the results in real-time to determine which offer generated the most activity, and within that activity, which members shared the most invitations and generated the most new users.

Surprisingly, the test identified the “exclusive access” offer as the clear winner, which Mint.com then deployed to the reminder of the target segment.

So how did they do?

The winning “exclusive access” email was opened by 48% of those mailed. Of those, over 10% became “Influencers” for the Mint.com brand by sharing the invitation with five friends each on average, significantly expanding their reach.

Mint.com Influencers sent an average of five invitations each via email and various social networks.

The campaign generated an impressive 61% click-through rate on the peer-to-peer invitations and every 2.6 invite clicks led to one new Mint.com user. In the end, Mint.com was able to generate thousands of new users at a $0.50 CPA, the lowest of any acquisition channel.

There are several key takeaways from this program. First, don’t underestimate the power of a personal referral for getting someone to act. According to a recent study by Nielsen, 90% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know and Mint.com was able to leverage this into thousands of new customers.

Second, when building out your program strategies for 2010, you should consider leveraging social media for more than just raising brand awareness. With a fresh approach to the channel, you too can tap into the power of social media to achieve your acquisition goals.





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