Marketing to the Masses: Four Steps to Finding Your Social Influencers

Excerpt from "Defining Social Influencers" White Paper, Part 1 of 4 of the New Approaches to Email Marketing White Paper Series 

In the olden days (aka: last year), many email marketers relied on house-list segments that followed the tried and true standard designed by years of direct marketing practices. Most companies' lists were comprised of segments including:

• Best customers (high purchasers, high dollar buyers or even long-time consumers)
• Worst customers (people on the verge of being removed from the list due to non-response)
• New customers (who often went through a 60-90 day on-boarding process to determine what other categories they would fall into)
• Unsubscribes (people who used to be on your list, but aren't anymore)

Those categories are fine to use if you are dealing with your customers on a one-on-one basis. But in today's digital-driven world, this approach can be very shortsighted. Especially in this economy, we can't afford to spend our resources and messaging efforts on one-to-one sales generation; we need to impact the masses. 

Luckily, the hundreds of social networks that have sprung up over the past few years enable us to do just that: enable our email marketing efforts, directed toward individuals, to impact the masses. This white paper walks you through four steps to make this happen:

1. Define new metrics for success.
2. Realize the changes social media encourages in conjunction with email marketing.
3. Look for ways you can identify social influencers on your email marketing list.
4. Start testing.

Step 3: Look for Ways You Can Identify Social Influencers on Your Email Marketing List 

"How can I identify my social influencers on my email list?" is one of the biggest questions we get asked these days. While the actual methods that work best for you will vary based on the size of your list, your industry and your offering, listed below are a few tried and true examples of what works.

Submitted by Hugo Guzman at Zeta Interactive: 

Send out an email survey asking list subscribers to give feedback on their level of social media engagement. 

The most targeted and successful approach is to send a series of these emails surveys, broken down by individual social network. For example, one of the survey emails would be focused on Twitter. It would include a Twitter-intensive subject line and would ask a series of questions regarding the user's level of engagement (how many followers, how often do you tweet, etc). It would also be a good idea to offer list subscribers some sort of incentive for responding, but chances are that folks who are big social media users will be happy to know that the brand is interested in them and will gladly fill out survey. 

Submitted by Stephanie Jackson at Zinio: 

Email a request to your Facebook list asking them to help reach a company goal and watch for those who reply. Check to see if they are on your email list. If so, look for people who have similar traits and then send a targeted email asking members of your list to share the word. Follow the responders and watch website traffic rates and trends on Google. 

Submitted by Amy Bills at Bulldog Solutions: 

One place to look for social influencers: your partners and vendors, particularly those who are leaders in the space. These folks are likely on your email list but they are not exhibiting the same activity as a prospect or a current client. Nonetheless, you're likely to find influencers among the ranks of those with whom you do business, and because they know you well and are in tune with the space, their sphere of influence is a perfect fit. 

To wit: Bulldog is a channel partner and power user of Eloqua marketing automation software. Eloqua's CTO, Steve Woods, is an active evangelical for marketing automation and in fact recently published a book on "Digital Body Language." In recent months we've worked closely with Steve—inviting him to speak on a Webinar we sponsored, collaborating with him on article content—and thus are able to harness his promotional activities while offering him validation and additional exposure. 

Submitted by Nicholas Einstein at Datran Media: 

Savvy email marketers use various conversion metrics and LTV formulas to segment and target high-value subscribers. The rise of social media gives us an exciting new framework for determining the value of our subscribers—value based on our subscriber's power and propensity to share content through their social network and drive viral growth of our programs. Identifying social media "influencers" within our subscriber bases is the first key step in devising a strategy to target them and take advantage of their power to syndicate our content. The first step we take with our clients that include "share to social" functionality in their emails is to track clicks to these links and leverage that behavioral data to drive future segmentation. 

Subscribers who are sharing your content may not all be true influencers, but it is likely that many of your true influencers will be clicking on the "share to social" link. For clients that are developing sophisticated social media strategies, or may otherwise be good candidates, we explore layering in additional data that more directly correlate to a subscriber's status as an influencer. Companies like Rapleaf, 33Across, Media6Degrees and Unbound Technologies all offer data that can help immediately identify influencers and let you focus on the strategies to target them. 

Submitted by Sheryl Biesman at NatureMade: 

Add links to your email that encourage people to share them on social sites like Facebook and Twitter. Keep in mind that it is important to differentiate between adding social media links that encourage people to "share" vs. encouraging them to add your brand as a favorite. We do both. We currently have hundreds of Facebook fans of the NatureMade brand. The vast majority of this is driven by our email marketing. 

Submitted by DJ Waldow at Bronto Software:

1. Add "Twitter Handle" as a field on your subscription landing page: A very basic email subscription landing page asks for Name and Email Address. Why not ask for a Twitter handle, too? This will allow you to create separate lists to market directly to Twitter users.
2. Use social media tools to find influencers: One way to identify some of the "social media influencers" on your email list is use tools like Twitter Grader (created by Hubspot) - http://twitter.grader.com/. This tool even provides the "Twitter Elite" by geographical region.
3. Use Twitter as another means to drive traffic to your email subscription page: Send out tweets asking folks to sign up to your email list for exclusive offers. Track this as a source and create Twitter-specific campaigns.