The New Inbox: The Intersection of Email, Mobile and Social Marketing

Ready or not, social media and mobile are prompting email marketers to re-examine the effectiveness of their current programs. With new social networks, mobile devices, and mobile apps constantly entering the digital arena, it’s easy to feel confused or overwhelmed. This session will provide an opportunity to pause, think, and take action on the intersection of email, social, and mobile. It will:

Explore how and why the mobile age is transforming the “inbox.”
Explain why your email marketing is a strong foundation for social and mobile marketing success.
Equip you with ways to immediately optimize for and navigate the social and mobile currents.

Moderator:
Sundeep Kapur, Digital Evangelist, NCR Corp.
Speakers:
Jay Jhun, Director of Strategic Services, BrightWave Marketing (@emailrocks)
Alex Lustberg, VP Marketing, Lyris (@alustberg)

Alex believes we live in a time of chaos. There’s a proliferation of data that makes it hard for marketers to understand their audience. Like the weather, you might be able to predict a couple days or weeks out, but you don’t really know.

Pinterest is a phenomena we couldn’t have guessed. How can you integrate different components?

How people get their email today:
Mobile: 36%
Desktop: 33%
Web mail: 31%

We have to design for small mobile devices at the same time as multi-monitor giant screens.

The importance of email:

107 trillion e-mails sent annually
$40 in ROI for every $1 spent
90% believe personalization improves performance

The customer convo:

Start with key questions like where are you customers, what are they talking about and what are they sharing.

Tip #1: Social for customer insights
Drive better engagement
Create more targeted messaging

Tip #2: Social for growing lists

Tip #3: Embed social in email

Tip #4: Social for one-to-one connections
Customer questions asked and answered in real time
Addresses multiple customers at once

Tip #5: Share all content to social

Tip #6: Integrate to further leads along the way

Tip #7: Design for mobile
Have a responsive version or else lose 30-50% of your target

Tip #8: Redeem email promotions via mobile

Tip #9: Stay ahead in social
Curate content that’s visually compelling; leveraging Pinterest may make sense for a business

Tip #10: Develop KPIs
Raw community growth
Subscriber list growth
Social sentiment
Site traffic
Email/text conversions
Sales conversions

A couple best practices:
Deliver a unified message to your customer
Utilize tools to quantify return on investment

Jay is next. He asks the audience to stand if they use a Droid. Blackberry users are asked to stand. Then iPhone users and finally Windows phone users. He says that it’s about 50/50 iPhone to other in the US. The mobile experience is different on all the devices and that has to be accounted for.

Mobile transcends channels:

Phone
Email
SMS
Camera
Social media
Blog
News
GPS
Restaurant guide
Hair cuts
So much more… No one should talk about mobile as a channel.

5 Action Items

1. Identify and target your mobile audience.
2. Get serious about subject lines and preview text.
3. Get smarter about leveraging shareworthy content in email. This includes media, video, blog, social media.
4. Design for mobile.
5. Mobile destinations required. At least have a landing page.

Virginia Nussey is the director of content marketing at MobileMonkey. Prior to joining this startup in 2018, Virginia was the operations and content manager at Bruce Clay Inc., having joined the company in 2008 as a writer and blogger.

See Virginia's author page for links to connect on social media.