Since the advent of Internet marketing, strategy has called for a careful calibration of branding efforts and direct response. Marketers could balance the needs for both with defined budgets for branding and measurable ROI for direct response.

Now online marketing has evolved to the point that brands no longer have to make artificial distinctions between brand engagement and lead generation. Well-integrated online campaigns offer powerful branding and direct response opportunities together.

With the arrival of a broad range of new opportunities — social marketing combined with SEO, SEM combined with DSP-enabled display, mobile, online video advertising, email, interactive TV — there are a myriad of new ways to accomplish these objectives. The challenge for today’s online professionals is to understand how these platforms overlap and how to capitalize on those points of integration.

It’s not that tried-and-true tactics like e-mail, search, and display campaigns have stopped working – it’s that to really stay ahead in this game you have to be agile and understand and apply newer technologies and activities to your craft.

The platforms that are best at branding – social media and display – can and should be meshed with direct response vehicles like search, SEO, and email. As various social and interactive communication channels enter and transform the arena, CMOs can gain the advantage by blending these channels into one comprehensive interactive-marketing strategy. Not only is it possible, it’s absolutely essential for your success.

Social, search, and media in particular are coming together rapidly, with social media serving as a common thread that binds campaigns together. Social media metrics like friends, fans, likes, and shares are adding a whole new menu of actions and success metrics to what we apply to online display and search.

Social media marketing is also adding new dimensions and opportunities to SEO by allowing marketers to build rank and links via Facebook Likes and social sharing, and distribute their content and brand to other pages and profiles living all over the web.

Think of rich media ads with Share buttons that encourage you to post content and share things via Twitter and Facebook. The category formerly known as online display has morphed into socially infused online media. Add to this new video pre-rolls with interactive features enabling you to click through and order.

Or consider Facebook ASUs (Facebook’s self-serve, cost-per-click ads), a great example of a social media-search marketing integration. These ads are targeted via keywords similar to search. They are PPC text ads like search. They can be managed, measured, and optimized much like search, as well as targeted to specific audiences. And they also can be used to drive Likes (fans).

A company fully embracing this integration is Sephora North America. Its fully integrated commerce-enabled iPad app lets consumers shop for beauty products in a magazine-like format.

Buyers can read product reviews, view videos, browse the company’s catalogs and purchase products and get up-to-the-minute news from Sephora’s social channels without leaving the app. There’s even a virtual mirror feature that lets consumers transform the iPad 2 into a side-by-side mirror and video player. Meanwhile Sephora is getting the word out via all the other choices on our online marketing menu.

The following are tactics you can use to integrate your online marketing mix:

• Combine search and retargeting powered display to put ads in front of paid search conversions and use robust tracking and reporting technologies to follow the impact of your actions on a real time basis across all channels.
• Submit your blog posts to social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit to drive traffic to your website and create incoming links.
• Use ad exchanges and DSPs that allow premium placements for branding and low-cost placements for transactions.
• Use Twitter to link followers to your latest blog post or email newsletter online to fuel interest and re-tweets.
• Create corporate profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and establish a company blog to dominate the results for brand terms.
• Incorporate trending topics and popular hash tags into your tweets to appear in Google’s real-time search results.
• Use email to announce new LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter feeds, directing readers to social networking sites for signup.
• Use the sidebar on your e-newsletter to list all company social networking profiles, and use those profiles to gather e-newsletter subscribers.
• Include a Fan Widget or Like call to action in banners, landing pages, media programs, and site content.
• Include a link to your Help forum or YouTube video tutorial within purchase-confirmation emails.
• Include a social-bookmark console on product pages to allow readers to share your website or product info.

It’s time to bring together your social media, search, display, mobile, email and interactive TV efforts. Understanding how they can intersect — and learning how to capitalize on those points of integration — is essential for success.

• Apply a direct response methodology to organic search;
• Go granular in keyword-level data analysis; and
• Strive for quality, not quantity.

Companies that are driving large-scale revenue lifts through organic search have shifted their approach and mindset. They’ve begun to build strategies and analyze their organic program in a similar way to how one would look at paid search – applying a direct response methodology.

RMI’s SEO Tactics Chart unveils many of the tactics we’ve executed as a result of this way of thinking. Combining the tactics within this chart with the principles laid out in this article will get you one step closer to success within your own organic search program.

1. Mine data to drive keyword selection

Begin by analyzing keyword-level conversion data when formulating your SEO strategy. Study your top paid search converters. In most cases, their organic counterparts will not convert as high in comparison but remember that keywords with a higher likelihood to convert will often times match up pretty well, on a relative scale.

Pair this data with traffic potential and you’re moving in the right direction. Then bring margin into the mix and give more weight to high margin-driving keywords. When compounding these metrics, you begin to create the roadmap for a very powerful program.

2. Measure incremental non-brand lift

One of the biggest mistakes we see when presented with organic performance data is taking credit for revenue and traffic lifts that did indeed occur, but not as a result of organic efforts. For starters, clearly break out brand and non brand data. If you say that you experienced a 45% month-over-month lift in organic traffic, ask yourself where it came from.

Was the majority of that lift the result of brand increasing due to an aggressive display campaign? These are important questions to ask. Consider seasonality as well. If revenue from non brand keywords in aggregate decreased 18% month-over-month, was it the result of your rankings taking a hit, or is search query volume down that month for those terms? Google Insights for Search can help you answer that question.

3. Stop obsessing over rankings

Would you ever analyze your paid search program by saying “let’s start off by looking at our Average Position report?” Absurd.

A keyword rankings report is one of the last things you should look at when evaluating the performance of your organic efforts. Remember that the SERP is fluid and dynamic in nature. It’s personalized to your behaviors and location. Between personalization of the SERP itself, and the fact that rankings are subject to a high degree of volatility, it’s a mistake to put too much emphasis on a particular ranking for a particular keyword at any particular moment in time.

A rankings report is never going to capture the real story of your program because it is usually only a sample of keywords that your site is ranking for. There could be hundreds or thousands of keywords that are driving traffic and conversions to your site that aren’t even being tracked in a rankings report.

4. Use direct response tactics in titles and descriptions

Persuasive, direct response focused copy seems to be forgotten when it comes to most organic search programs. Incorporate attributes like this into your titles and descriptions and you’ll have a good chance to garner the click even if you’re showing in a lower position than your competitors:

• Percentage off
• Price point
• Free shipping
• 100% guarantee
• Order now

5. Predetermine your landing pages

Remembering that you are focused on conversions and not rankings, it’s time to map out exactly which page you want a user to land on when they conduct a search and click your listing. Pair up keywords and landing pages from the get-go. The home page is usually not the page you want a user to land on, especially on a non branded search. Get the searcher away from the home page and to the most relevant sub category or product page when appropriate and you’ll feel the uptick in conversions.

There are a lot of ways to migrate home page rankings to a deeper and more relevant page within your site. It comes down to your internal linking strategy and offsite efforts. Create a mapping guide, and stick to it. A very short-term dip may occur, but because your conversion rate will increase by ranking the deeper page it always pays to pull the trigger and execute this strategy.

Organic search is a fantastic vehicle for efficient customer acquisition so long as it is planned and executed properly. Applying the strategies and tactics referenced in this article will help in getting one step closer to your category domination and overall success in your organic search program.

It’s been a few years since WPP Chairman Sir Martin Sorrell classified the relationship between Google and the agency world as “frenemies.” I actually had my first Google moment in 2003 when I worked with a company launching an AdSense competitor. I remember being really surprised to hear that a major publisher had passed on my client in order to partner with Google for contextual advertising. Couldn’t they see what was happening? It was clear to me then that regardless of the “Do No Evil” tag line, Google was growing in power and that everyone had to carefully watch the company’s actions.

I have been surprised that agencies have not done more to support Google’s competitors. If I were working at a digital ad agency, I’d want Microsoft and Yahoo! to provide viable alternatives to Google. I’d encourage my clients to shift a disproportionate share of their search budgets to these competing search solutions just to ensure that the search ecosystem would have competing search solutions.

As Google strengthens their position in display advertising through their acquisition of DoubleClick, Invite Media and now Admeld, I wonder if agencies shouldn’t be doing more to address the changing market dynamics.

Let me be clear – I have nothing against Google. It’s a great company and has developed some great products. And it has contributed a lot to the advancement of online advertising as a marketing vehicle. I personally think that Android is going to be a big winner for the company down the road.

But in the capitalist society in which we live, competition is good for business. And ultimately, a vibrant online advertising ecosystem will be good for Google, enabling them to focus on Apple, Facebook and Microsoft instead of visits from anti-trust lawyers and government officials.

So this is what I’d recommend to Google:

1. Tone down the direct marketer relationship rhetoric — Would it have killed anyone in Google’s PR department if the aforementioned press release would have been between Heineken and Heineken’s digital ad agency? Everyone knows you have the power and the data. There is no need to flaunt it.

2. Share more love – Google’s Crisis Response to the earthquake in Japan in March featuring Person Finder was brilliant. The best way for Google to show that they’re friends is to use their technology to do good. Google should look for more ways around the world and downtown to show us how they help the community.

What do you think Google should do?

That’s what today’s most successful new companies demand from their advertising partners. Oh, yes – and ways to measure both. Quickly, so as not to waste precious marketing dollars and time on creative executions and ad buys that don’t make the web servers hum or the phones ring.

In other words, they want image advertising plus direct response “immediate results” – but minus the over-the-top sales pitch (think Dan Aykroyd’s hilarious “Bass-O-Matic” spots on “Saturday Night Live”).

Thankfully, creative agencies have discovered new ways to deliver direct response advertising while also supporting a more polished brand image. And fortunately for media buyers and brands, technological developments and access to volumes of consumer and other data have helped make measurement instant – and instant adjustments to both creative and media-buying strategies a reality.

This new form of image and direct response creative has converged with new analytic capabilities at the intersection of the retail and service sectors and the Internet. Start-ups now demand their agencies deliver fresh, compelling creative as well as media buys that offer instantaneous and measureable proof of return on investment (ROI).

The results of this approach can be stunning. Take Priceline.com, a company my agency was fortunate enough to meet more than a dozen years ago. Within less than six months of its 1998 launch, 62.5 million consumers reported they were aware of the name – the fastest branding of a new company in history, according to The Brand Institute.

More important, Priceline continues to enjoy record sales and a 20 percent compounded growth rate thanks in no small part to brilliantly executed creative and a media buying program that constantly challenges the status quo.

Why are companies like Priceline successful? Because an ROI-centric advertising program works in a world in which consumers make instant decisions and “click” to “buy now.” No longer is the goal solely to build a brand, or to stimulate intent to purchase. Instead, the objective is to generate an actual purchase and to be able to explain as much as possible how and why that purchase occurred so that additional purchase activity can be stimulated.

By tracking key ad components, correlating ad airings and website activity, and calculating the resulting response rate and cost of acquisition, an ROI-oriented advertising program can deliver unsurpassed value and assure client retention.

Relying on time-honored metrics no longer is enough. For example, research shows that the majority of consumers reached through television advertising respond by visiting the advertiser website, often located through a branded search engine, for more information. Understanding the link between ad airings and client-related search activity is an additional way to assess the impact of a campaign.

However, tracking the consumer response an ad or series of ads triggers is only the tip of the iceberg. Through the use of complex analytics, media buyers can test and assess strategies and optimize ad spends. As results are achieved and the cost of acquisition becomes clear, campaigns can be scaled and results extrapolated.

An ROI-focused approach to media buying addresses both the long and short term. Rapid and unpredictable changes in the media and economic landscape make real-time testing more critical than ever before, while tracking and analytics enable a media-agnostic identification of best-performing channels. The result is a customized, hybrid approach that focuses on what the client company seeks to achieve, as opposed to simply repeating what has worked in the past.

All this is not to say that longer-term brand objectives no longer are important. Cultivating and maintaining a trustworthy brand is an integral part of what drives response – especially ongoing response. However, as consumers increasingly embrace mobile technology, understanding “now” behavior becomes an extremely important consideration for everyone with an interest in advertising.

(If you want to drink an alcoholic beverage deemed “manly” — which in this case I take to mean rich and strong — you wouldn’t choose a “lite” beer. You’d drink an appropriately hoppy IPA, sip a glass of extremely robust Cabernet Sauvignon or just sink shots of whiskey.)

When those Miller Lite ads come on is when I really wish Kampyle’s Ad Feedback technology existed for television. Alas, mainly direct response and lead-gen display campaigns take advantage of the recently launched service from the consumer feedback specialist.

Mousing over a small thumbs up sign in the corner of the ad unveils an “Ad Feedback” box, which when clicked opens a window for providing feedback to the advertiser:

According to Product Director of Ad Feedback Phillipe Lang, in the pilot program, 1 in every 25,000 impressions earns feedback (0.0004%), but of that group 15% leave their contact information, which goes right to the advertiser and can assist in starting a dialog with the consumer/lead.

Lang added that feedback rates were higher for rich media ads than static banners — anything that attracted the user’s attention was more likely to generate a response. However, he noted that rich media feedback tended to be divergent — people that really like or really hate the creative are likely to respond.

But display feedback can come in handy on many levels — Kampyle’s analytics dashboard enables advertisers to judge which campaigns and creatives generated the most attention (be it positive or negative) and why. Feedback also gives insight into ad placement — whether the ad seemed irrelevant or offensive regarding the surrounding content — and the reporting engine segments by demographics such as location.

Inserting Ad Feedback is simply a matter of adding the Java code, which is supported by major ad servers such as Right Media, MediaMind, Atlas and DoubleClick. While the product has found a base with DR work, Kampyle is looking into more branding campaigns.

I suggest starting with dumb beer ads — what’s the deal with the Coors Light TV ads where the guy walks into an eroticized apartment filled with candles and thanks his lingerie-clad girlfriend for surprising him with a 12-pack of beer? I get they’re going for a cheap laugh, but isn’t that suggesting Coors Light drinkers are oblivious buffoons? COORS NEEDS MY FEEDBACK NOW!

“Some people think Dapper is a gentleman’s clothing site from London,” he quips.

No, the company is called Dapper because they are makers of “daps” — “data maps,” the nickname for the content feeds Dapper helps build.

In 2006 cofounder Eran Shir, a black hole physicist (“and a really interesting guy,” Beriker adds) had a startup in Israel focused on Internet infrastructure usage and the analytics surrounding it. He met Jon Aizen, computer scientist from Cornell, who was also passionate about enabling browsers to view content on their own terms, as HTML construction is constraining.

Together they built a platform that enabled developers to create APIs for assembling feeds, ultimately allowing consumers to digest content in whatever form they wanted. The machine-learning technology examines the structure of a website and the hierarchy within the HTML and discerns similar elements. The integrity of the dap can withstand site modification.

In 2008 Dapper boasted 100,000 daps and a million XML calls a day, but Shir and Aizen were feeling limited — daps could be put to further use. But they saw opportunity in online advertising’s most notorious slacker.

Although it was an established infrastructure in every website, display advertising was never relevant or engaging — no surprise that CTR had fallen through the basement because the ads weren’t resonating with consumers

“It’s astonishing to me that it’s still a $9 billion industry,” Beriker comments.

Dapper saw the potential for a new display ad unit that would essentially turn a product catalog into a live feed. However, through using user actions on advertisers’ sites and other intent data to gather data representing user intent, these ads could be targeted to put highly relevant — and dynamic — content in front a user, changing the way advertisers and agencies buy and optimize display ads.

“And along the way, make the web a better place,” Beriker adds, which was the original intent. Hey, if you can change the world and make a buck, who am I to judge?

Hence Dapper’s display platform was designed to enable marketers to not only index but dynamically present content in various ways. Powered by Dapper’s IntentMatch technology, the platform extracts products, offers and relevant content from advertisers’ sites. In particular, retailers with highly liquid inventory — online travel agencies such as Expedia and Kayak — are fond of Dapper’s services as it updates in real-time.

Yesterday the company released the Dapper Display DR Platform as both a full- and self-service display solution for direct-response-focused large advertisers that combines a media buying platform with the ability to create, traffic and target dynamic ads based on advertiser inventory.

Part of the solution is pure convenience — it’s a confusing ecosystem out there, Beriker says, and although more brands are realizing the potential of display and audience targeting, it’s difficult to figure out where to start.

“We’ve essentially unified or consolidated different elements of the stack,” he says. “Rather than going to four or five places to do all this, we can do all the efficient media buying and run real-time media buying across the Google DoubleClick Ad Exchange and the other exchanges.”

While a typical DSP enables high-volume segment-buying based on data across exchanges, Dapper uses algorithms to inform the media-buying decision — bids are based on how well an offer might convert based on the ad served. The technology employs 15 to 20 factors such as time of day and strength of intent when determining the probability of conversion — the process takes a whole 50 milliseconds.

“In search marketing, you use a single platform to place your bid for the keyword and serve the static text ad — it’s holistically optimized,” says Beriker, who was previously CEO and president of Efficient Frontier, which blends search and display for performance marketing. “In Dapper Display DR, our ability to buy media based on intent signals and serve an ad based on the probability of conversion allow for real efficiency.”

Say the ad served was based on a flight query previously made by a user, the final optimized ad would display flights from the user’s preferred airlines and departure times, as well as price  and seat availability changes since the last query. There could be a discount included for converting right then and there. Afterward, an advertiser can employ retargeting techniques — so the user bought a flight, won’t he or she need a hotel?

The self-service platform makes it simple to serve offers and automatically build dynamic creative via the users website or feed. Setting up where the crawler hunts for inventory on a site is surprisingly intuitive. Don’t take my word for it — check out the video below.

“Figures often beguile me,” Mark Twain wrote over 100 years ago, but it expresses the frustration and analysis paralysis of many digital marketers today. Why is measurement so difficult when we employ armies of brilliant analytics people using extremely sophisticated tools? There are three primary obstacles:

1. Too Much Information (TMI). The web is so data-heavy, it’s easy to miss what’s really happening. Numbers may not lie, but they can mislead if you aren’t looking at the right ones. Every day, digital marketers wade through immense volumes of marketing program data, scouring reports of clickthroughs, open rates, costs per action, or new engagement statistics, most of which don’t answer the core question about what a marketing initiative is contributing to your business.

2. Unmeasured objectives. Too often marketers haven’t mapped out specific digital metrics that align with their business objectives. When you can’t connect the dots of marketing activity to goals, you don’t know what to look for, so you look at everything, crunching excess data and reporting too many metrics. Measurement should indicate progress toward business goals, and point out actions to help achieve them.

3. ROI overemphasis. ROI is revered as measurement’s Holy Grail because it draws a direct line from investment to impact. In practice, calculating ROI is sometimes impossible – information is unavailable, consumer behavior is too complex, multiple influences can’t be separated, or costs aren’t properly allocated. Focusing solely on ROI drives a cycle of unrealistic measurement expectations and disappointment. Tactical performance metrics are also needed to guide improvement, with or without ROI.

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” — Albert Einstein

How do you transform raw data into knowledge and insights that identify business opportunities? As digital measurement evolves, here are some immediate steps to help:

Focus on the critical few, not the insignificant many. Focus, focus, focus on the few metrics that matter most. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should, measure and report everything. Take your top objectives and assign 1-2 priority metrics against each. Take a reductionist approach to marketing analytics, prioritizing valuable information, and separating measurement wheat from the chaff.

Make current metrics more precise. Some metrics are simply inaccurate. Attributing actions to the last click over-credits Paid Search, and ignores display’s impact (22% lift on search conversions — Atlas), so ascribe some assist to all marketing exposures leading to a final action. Engagement must be specifically defined for your business, because if your site goal is easy registration or checkout, Time Spent on Site is the wrong engagement definition, although it might be perfect for a brand site.

Avoid direct response only. Action metrics speak loudest, so 30% of total direct response dollars are spent online, but over 90% of branding spend is offline. Digital rushed to deliver direct response and sales-attributed metrics, but largely ignored impact on awareness, attitudes, and branding. It’s time to avoid solely focusing on actions like the click, and consistently incorporate brand impact, qualitative site feedback, and content engagement metrics.

Identify proxies. You often can’t track ROI or the direct path to a sale, but can measure behavior that’s strongly connected. One marketer conducted site visitor research and discovered that a specific download was highly correlated with a sale. They then reoriented their marketing to drive that download and measure success against this new-found proxy.

Continuously learn and improve. Structure your programs to monitor success constantly — from launch, through implementation and afterward. Set aside 10% of your budget to test potential enhancements, so you can quickly deploy all effort only to initiatives that work best. Some call this “failing immediately” because you almost instantly know what isn’t performing and eliminate it.

Assess all key initiatives. Take a comprehensive measurement view, establishing at least one key metric for each area of focus. Define success metrics against each business objective, marketing tactic, and key target or constituency. Spell out top metrics for each stage of building a customer relationship — Awareness, Engagement, Action and Retention. Incorporate all metrics categories — qualitative, quantitative, financial and customer profiles.

The pressure to measure and the volume of data sometimes seem overwhelming. Do your best to calculate ROI, but don’t ignore other key metrics that indicate whether your marketing programs are performing successfully against your business objectives.

Some lead-generation and direct-response marketers using targeting techniques have already seen this nightmare come true as ClickZ has learned that Facebook has incorporated an evaluation program that will decline ads if they loosely include user profile attributes. If the targeting aspect isn’t deemed relevant to the actual product or service — DENIED.

The semi-automated, semi-human-operated (it’s a frakkin’ cylon!) process decides if an ad is legitimately targeted to a locality, gender or age demographic. Sound pretty arbitrary? Several marketers report are that their ads with profile-based copy have been rejected and that their click-through rates and conversions have nose-dived.

But the affected advertisers aren’t ready to whip out their pitchforks, light the torches and angrily march toward Castle von Facebook yet. Sure, they’re complaining, but there seems to be a general understanding that this is part of the site’s growing pains in accommodating both users and advertisers.

“We are not actually going to know the outcome to all of these policy shifts until they are done,” Oz Sultan, executive advisor for Perks Consulting, told ClickZ. “We are just kind of getting the ‘bear with us’ [talk] right now.”

Today I want to discuss two complementary channels for direct response advertisers, as well as brand advertisers who have clear engagement metrics: performance display on social networks and in-game advertising.

Performance Display on Social Networks

Facebook is the dominant provider in this space and the best place to start. Growing from 300 million users in September 2009 to 400 million in January 2010 is impressive. Even more staggering is when Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg was quoted at Davos as reporting that 50% of Facebook users come to the site every day.

This is an audience that cannot be ignored.

Fortunately, Facebook provides a rich set of targeting criteria including geography, age, gender, education and even relationship status that allow you to sift through the 400 million users to your exact audience. Of course, targeting by itself is not enough. As has been discussed in the past on Adotas, advertisers must craft a consistent message, from ad copy all the way through the final steps in the conversion funnel – and for each niche audience. They must also measure and adjust to ensure optimal campaign performance.

In-Game Advertising

Users on Facebook spend more time on applications than on any other section of Facebook with the exception of the home page, according to a May 2009 study by Nielsen. What is the majority of these applications? Games.

The dominant form of in-game advertising is done via offers in which an advertiser defines the exact engagement criteria and, in return for completing the engagement, the consumer is rewarded with a small amount of virtual currency that they can use in the game. A sample of successful consumer engagements include:

• Watching a movie trailer then joining the movie’s fan page
• Submitting a credit card offer
• Registering for a trial membership at a fitness club

By combining a performance display buy with in-game advertising, advertisers are able to significantly increase their reach as well as engagement. Where do you start? Facebook for performance display and Adknowledge as one option for in-game advertising.

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.