Lyris is exhibiting at the DMA this week, Booth #1630.

Cross-Channel Marketing Challenge

As marketers, we are aware of the gaining momentum and importance of social media in our cross-channel communications. Today we are seeing both consumer-based and business-to-business companies integrating social media into their marketing. Here are some quick facts:

While they are an extremely valuable tool, newsletter can be tricky. How do you get customers to open them, read them and take action – whatever that action might be? In an effort to help marketers improve newsletter content, distribution and deliverability, we wanted to share some best practices we see and use every day:

• Nearly 2.4 billion users have social networking accounts, with anticipated growth to 3.9 billion by the end of 2015, according to the study "Email Statistics Report 2011-2015."
• More than 107 trillion emails were sent in 2010, according to The New York Times.
• With more than 5 billion mobile devices in use daily worldwide (Source: BBC News 2010), people are staying digitally connected to friends, colleagues and brands all the time, from everywhere.
• And we are not just talking about the consumer market. In fact, corporate email accounts are expected to increase at a faster pace than consumer email accounts with a total of all worldwide email accounts to increase from an installed base of 3.1 billion in 2011 to nearly 4.1 billion by 2015 (Source: Email Statistics Report 2011-2015).

That is a tremendous amount of digital traffic and much of that traffic is driven by businesses, rather than personal conversations.

Cross-Channel Marketing Solution

I know what you are thinking. Wow that’s a lot of compelling data. So what does all this mean to you?

In essence it means that there is an opportunity for marketers to engage with their audience across channels and put the customer at the center of this cross-channel communications. In effective cross-channel marketing, the customer is followed throughout their journey with your company, as they naturally migrate from one channel to another, based on their needs. Because your messages are relevant and segmented, maybe they open your emails 75% of the time, but they also might “like” you on Facebook or “follow” you on Twitter.

The question is: How can we as marketers engage across channels easily and effectively without adding another layer of complexity into our already multi-tasked, limited budget, lower resourced marketing teams (or in some cases, person)? At Lyris, we have considered this and we are introducing a solution that we believe will help marketers solve this problem.

Social Media Panel, Enhancers and Segmentation Features

I’m excited to announce that Lyris HQ now has several integrated social features that will enable marketers to connect with their customers more efficiently and effectively than ever. Today we announced our new social enhancement features that provide direct benefits for marketers. Everything you need to connect your email marketing campaigns to key social channels such as Twitter and Facebook is now built into the Lyris HQ message creation workflow. These key features and benefits include:

• Social Media Panel: With Lyris HQ marketers are now empowered to easily connect their email campaigns to Twitter and Facebook directly from their message workflow creation via the Social Media Panel that is always on the dashboard. Post and monitor updates, add a photo easily or even shorten URLs.
• Social Enhancers: With new social enhancer features marketers can now insert specific social sites and customized actions such as “Facebook Like, “Twitter Share” and “LinkedIn Share” into an email message. By enabling social enhancers directly from the message creation workflow, marketers achieve more control over their message and increased functionality in tracking and measuring the results of cross-channel social integration.
• Social Segmentation: And finally, what good is this information for you if you can’t track it and further hone in on the social channels your audience prefer? With these new features you can segment by which consumers clicked on the social links. This enables marketers to send targeted messages to their most engaged customers, fostering better engagement and viral communications.

We’d love to hear what you think about these new updates. If you are attending DMA, we are there this week at booth #1630 and I’ll be presenting during the DMA Townhall today from 11:15-12:15 p.m. At our booth we’ll be demonstrating these new social features and raffling off a ViewSonic Tablet PC and other fun prizes. Follow @Lyris on Twitter for more details and stop by and see us at DMA!

Read more about the new social features in Lyris HQ.

About the Author

Tina Stewart (@socialTIS) is Senior VP Of Marketing at Lyris.