Example: Social Media Monitoring

and Listening Platforms....

"A technology and analytics infrastructure that mines a wide variety of traditional, online, and social sources to extract and deliver insights that shape a firm’s marketing strategy." (Forrester Research)

A direct example of how SMM can improve your bottom line.
Many companies now use targeted mass e-mail to send special offers to selected customers. Often the response rates are disappointing, leaving marketing and sales to expensively review, rethink and redesign the campaign for the next promotion. Using Social Media Monitoring / Listening Platform technology we were able to find an unexpected explanation for one client which enabled a large part of the low response rate problem to be fixed in under an hour without the need to involve the marketing and sales campaign team. All that was needed was for the client to authenticate their outbound mailing programme using Sender ID and DKIM so that ISPs would not class their e-mail promotions as spam and cause them to be deleted them before they read by the campaign target recipients. A cheap, simple and a very effective way of increasing the campaign response rate which would never have come to light without Social Media Monitoring / Listening Platform technology.

The return on investment was extraordinary: £1,000 to identify the cause of the problem, £250 to fix the problem so £1,250 to generate incremental annual sales measured in millions with the additional benefit that marketing and sales need not waste time repeatedly re-designing campaigns to try and fix the low response rate problem.

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

UPDATED 23/01/09

There’s been talk for some time now that ISPs would eventually take into consideration whether an email was authenticated when deciding whether to block email from a particular sender. So I was intrigued when Hotmail blocked all the content of an email from Office Depot last week and flagged it as potentially “dangerous.”



When I clicked on the “Learn more” link, I was shown a message about Sender ID and phishing that appeared to indicate that the Office Depot email was flagged because it failed Sender ID and phishing tests.



Even after I clicked “Open message,” all the images in the email were blocked.



And even after I clicked “Show content,” the email still carried the warning that it “may be dangerous.”



Considering that this was indeed a legit email from Office Depot (who was on my safe sender list), all email marketers should be alarmed—although thus far this is the only retail email that I’ve seen flagged by Hotmail in this manner. Regardless, this is a sign of things to come.

UPDATE: I've since seen a second email from Office Depot blocked as well as a TigerDirect email.

For those email marketers who have not authenticated their email with both Sender ID and DKIM, consider this your wake-up call. Getting your emails authenticated should be your top New Year’s resolution.