Using Web 2.0 to help your email marketing

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on April 14, 2008

The debate about social media, Web 2.0 etc. displacing email has moved on from the aggressive posturing stage as we recognize that the two live side by side, each influenced by the other.

The question is not whether social networks and other alternative communication media will kill email, but how they will change email. How can you exploit new online developments to boost your email marketing results?

There are two approaches here.

Transfer concepts

The first is to take the concepts underpinning the success of things like Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, del.icio.us etc. and see if they might find application in email.

A good example is the idea of "interaction" and "user generated content"...which drive all four of the above success stories.

Email was designed as a two-way communication technology. But email marketing has never really recognized this. As you can tell from the vocabulary used. We push out messages to passive recipients. It's largely a one-way stream of content and promotions.

So why not look to make your emails more of a two-way dialog? It's not a new idea and is part of the renaissance of the email relationship as subscriber power grows (they have "report spam" buttons, we don't have "report subscriber" buttons.)

In her article on newsletter engagement, Jeanne Jennings writes...

"There are many ways to encourage readers to interact with an e-mail newsletter or Web site and just as many ways to use the resulting content."

...and she lists a few possibilities for you to consider. Her fellow columnist Karen Gedney touches on similar themes: the subscriber as a source (as well as a receptacle) of content.

Exploit the technology

The other approach is to look for innovative email opportunities among the new technologies. We're still camped fairly securely at the bottom of the learning curve here, but Simms Jenkins has some ideas in his latest article.

Another fascinating idea comes from Marty Weintraub, who suggests thinking of blog comment threads as micro-targeted email lists.

When people add a comment to a blog post, they often subscribe to get further comments via email. Which opens opportunities for the owners of the blog to post relevant comments to that "email list" with a smidgen of promotion thrown in. It's not dissimilar to the thinking behind adding marketing elements to transactional emails.

Anyone else got any ideas of how Web 2.0 or social networks can benefit email marketing?

Tags: email marketing, social networks

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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