As an owner, marketer or sales person, social media presents an outstanding opportunity to listen in and connect with customers in a new way. Overnight, brands have had to move from marketing to customers one to one to marketing to thousands at once through social platforms. Social enterprise marketing can help your business make sense of the social data coming your way and leverage it for great customer connections and bigger profits.

What is Social Enterprise Marketing?

Social enterprise marketing is both practical and theoretical. Embracing social enterprise marketing for your business means taking the approach that social media is part of your company culture and your interactions with customers for the foreseeable future. It’s about shifting from the company to customer model and aiming to create a community that cares about your brand and purchases from you.

Social enterprise marketing represents the future of business interactions for a few key reasons.

1.    Social media is here to stay.

It’s become clear in the last several years that social media is not a fad. Customers are using it more frequently and in more diverse ways. New sites are catching on with greater frequency than ever before. Customers are engaging with each other and companies on multiple platforms. It’s time for companies to integrate social media fully into how they do business. With social enterprise marketing, it becomes more integrated into the basic business functions that keep a company running – from initial client engagement to follow up in order to build trust.

2.    Customers will respond better when they are at the heart of your efforts.

Social media has ushered in a customer-centric approach that all companies need to embrace in order to be successful. Social enterprise marketing strategies help bridge the gap between the old company-client model and the burgeoning community approach that customers are responding to. Placing your customers at the heart of what your business does by listening, engaging and responding on social media will make a big difference in your long term success.

3.    Traditional social media approaches are scattered and unscientific.

With multiple platforms being used by prospects and existing customers, it’s become challenging to keep track of who is saying what and where they are saying it. In contrast, social enterprise marketing helps businesses consolidate their information so they can respond to consumer preferences better and gather intelligence on social data.

4.    Social enterprise marketing helps team members interact more efficiently.

The social media revolution has not only affected the relationship between company and customer, but it’s fundamentally changed the way that employees and team members interact. With social enterprise marketing methods, employees can be empowered with social tools to connect with one another, work more efficiently and reach key goals.

Embracing social enterprise marketing is the next essential stage of business success – will your organization be ready?

What is Social Enterprise Marketing?

Before we delve into how social enterprise marketing can help you reach out to ideal customers, it’s important to get some definitions straight. Social enterprise marketing is a term that’s been adopted to refer to marketing practices based on social data and the interactions between a brand and its customers (and a brand and its employees). Organizations can tap into the multitude of data that is being generated by buyers on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms.

Social enterprise is a term that is used for an organization that focuses on benefitting the environment and/or social causes. Social enterprises can be non-profit or for-profit, but their main focus is to use their influence to change the world in some way.

Using Social Enterprise Marketing to Find and Reach Your Ideal Customer

Social enterprise marketing allows brands to connect with customers on their level. Today’s customer has more power than ever before due to social media involvement. Rather than try to mold a customer to fit a brand’s purposes and needs, brands need to adapt and become part of the conversation.

Incorporate the following principles into your social media usage to get the most out of social enterprise marketing:

Listen and Learn: Social media updates are being created in more massive numbers than ever before. By setting up listening tools that help you understand the conversation and understand your customers, you can learn more about them and their needs. Public social networks can help you zero in on ideas, understand how your products and services are perceived in the marketplace and make plans for future developments.

Engage: According to a Clickfox survey, 97% of customers identify as “somewhat influenced” to “very influenced” by other customers’ comments about companies on social media. Engaging with ideal customers on this platform puts your brand at the center of the conversation. You can develop a more in depth presence and encourage customers to become your brand advocates to their social media contacts.

Publish Fresh Content: Your social consumers are looking for resources. If you’re the company that provides those resources, you’ll naturally become a bigger part of the conversation. Make it a priority to publish fresh content and share it via social media. Your fans and followers will spread the word for you and help you engage with more ideal customers.

Understanding what social enterprise marketing can do for your organization makes it easier to adapt the typical way of doing things. Adapting to social enterprise marketing from traditional marketing methods takes a new perspective and different tools – but it’s well worth it to engage with more ideal customers on their terms.

How to Set Goals with Metrics

1. Start with an objective.

The goal setting process starts with reviewing your overall marketing strategies and setting a specific objective for your business. What does your business need most right now? Example answers could include more leads, more sales, more subscriptions. Write down several different options and then select one objective to focus on for now. You can get to the others later, but for simplicity’s sake you need to zero in just on one.

2. Tie that objective to a specific metric.

Your overall objective applies to all of your business and marketing practices but it can be tied directly to a specific email marketing metric. If you want more leads, that means getting closer and developing your relationship with your current list members. If this is the case, you may want to focus on improving your open rates. This is often a good starting point for improving email marketing campaigns because improving open rates can open the door for improving other metrics (clickthroughs, etc).

3. Review your past performance in this metric.

Once you’ve selected a metric to focus on, review your past performance and take a look at any trends with this figure. Do you see a slow increase in the metric as your list grows? Has the figure been holding steady? Are there any jumps or spikes in improvement? If there have been some spikes in performance, take a look at those specific emails. Is there something about the subject line or the timing of the messages that created the increase? Any differences in the metric can give you clues about what will work best with your list.

4. Set a specific goal for that metric.

Setting a goal to improve your open rates isn’t specific enough. If you want to achieve a goal, you have to get very clear about your goal and put it into definite terms. A better goal for this metric would be “Increase open rates by 15% over the course of 90 days.” Write down your specific goal and share it with your team. Notify anyone that is involved in your email marketing campaign creation that this is the goal so you are all working toward the same end.

5. Select and apply tactics that will move you closer to your goal.

Tactics are actions and techniques that you will use in order to reach your metrics goal. What steps do you need to take in order to change your outcome? Your history can give you important clues about which tactics to use but also look to industry best practices in order to create a plan that will help you reach your goals.

Here are some situations when a comparing jobs report is a good idea:

-You have recently added new leads to your email marketing list and want to compare your effectiveness from before and after the additions.

-You are trying a new promotion and need to compare its reception across multiple lists.

-Your organization wants to pinpoint the reason that your campaigns have suddenly stopped working.

How to Pull Reports for Multiple Jobs at Once

For Boomerang email marketing customers, comparing multiple jobs is easy with the “compare jobs” report. In the reporting panel, use the following steps:

-Click on the Compare Jobs Tab and then select “Create New.”

-Next, select the jobs you’d like included in the report. You can compare two jobs or several at once.

-Be sure to select a name and description for the report so you know what you’re looking at.

-Click on “Save Changes.”

-Once the report has been created, you can click on the name of the report and a new window will open up with your results.

-The report will show you the initial list size of each job, the emails sent, unique opens, unique responder clicks, bounces and unsubscribes.

-If you want to see a list of the names or addresses that were bounced, or any of the other details, click on the total to download the list.

With these steps, you can use cumulative reports to understand multiple jobs and compare the results of your email marketing.

There are two main categories that reports fall into and they give you different insights on your message’s performance and the growth of your list. Understanding the difference between the two will help you get targeted information that you can use to increase your results with email marketing.

Activity reports detail exactly what happened to the marketing messages after they left the servers. Information in these reports will help you understand how recipients are interacting with your emails. The five most common activity reports are:

1) Delivery

This details how many of the emails on your list were successfully sent to your list members.

2) Opens

This report shows how many emails were successfully delivered AND opened by the recipients. With the data on this report, you can test out the effectiveness of your email open rates.

3) Click-throughs

Click-throughs represent the traffic that your webpage or other link receives from email marketing recipients. If your email messages contain links to blog articles or portions of your website, you can track who visited which links with this report.

4) Unsubscribed

It’s never a good thing when someone unsubscribes, but it happens to even the best newsletters. With this report, you should focus on looking at overall trends and not focusing on single unsubscribes.

5) Forwards

When someone forwards your newsletter or message to friends and family, you’ll see it on this report. Increased numbers on this report mean that you’re creating something worthwhile and interesting in your newsletters.

Analytic reports take the raw data and help you analyze what factors are making your email marketing list successful and which areas need improvement. The five common analytics reports include:

1) Analysis by email recipient

This type of report focuses on which email recipients are opening your emails, how often each email address stays on your list and other key factors related to email addresses.

2) Date

Certain dates and days may have better responses. This type of report helps you keep track of which dates were most effective in the past so you can make better plans for future email deliveries.

3) Hour of the day

The same rule applies with this email marketing analytics report. The hour of the day that you send messages has an effect on your open rates and your level of success. You can use this report to plan ahead and select an hour that works best.

4) Destination link

Your destination link report will give you insight into the best places to send your targeted traffic from your email list. Make it a habit to check this type of report and structure your campaigns and destination links accordingly.

5) List source

Certain lists or list segments may perform better for you. A list source report will help you analyze your email marketing segments and understand where your best responding segments are.

With analytics reports and activity reports, you can get a complete look of your email marketing performance and make your campaigns more effective.

Whether you are an existing customer or about to start using Boomerang, this service will help you make better use of your monthly email credits and have a better understanding of your list as a whole. With a better understanding of your list you can correctly segment and send to the appropriate addresses.

We notice here at Boomerang that a lot of our customers benefit from this list cleaning service. Pricing will depend on the size of your list and the amount of time our professional services team spends with your list. If you are interested in talking with a member of our sales team here about what we can do for your company please call 1-800-779-7792 or email sales@boomerang.com

A great landing page gives you a targeted URL to send prospects to so you can build your list. If you’re sending your social media traffic or article backlinks to your homepage or even your services page, you may be muddying the waters and making things too complicated for your prospects. A streamlined landing page will help you boost opt ins and get better results from your traffic.

What Makes a Great Landing Page?

Many businesses set up an opt in form and then hope for the best. Or they set up a rudimentary landing page and aren’t sure why it isn’t producing better results. There are a few key principles that make the difference in your landing page results.

1) Keep your landing page scannable.

Your landing page isn’t the place to launch into long winded paragraphs about the value of signing up for your email list or explaining a complicated aspect of your business. Your visitors want to get the gist of what they will receive when they sign up for your email marketing list. They want to scan through the content and images and glean the basics. With this in mind, it’s important to keep your landing page streamlined. Use just a few key images to get your point across. Use headlines and bullet points for your content and focus on the main benefits. Your landing page visitors will be able to go over the page quickly and make a decision about signing up.

2) Focus your page on one goal.

Don’t try to get your visitor to sign up for your list, request a free consultation and read a blog post all at the same time. It’s important to narrow your focus. If you can, eliminate the header navigation and footer links from your landing page so there are no distractions. The only options your visitors should have on the page should be signing up for your email marketing list or clicking away.

3) Target a specific audience.

You can create several different landing pages to target different potential users. When you have a specific audience in mind for a particular landing page, you can easily select the right images and words that will appeal to your audience. For example, you may have a list for local clients and a list for other professionals who refer work to your company. Each of these lists should have their own landing page that speaks directly to the differences in these audiences.

With these keys in mind, you can create great landing pages that increase your subscriber numbers and help you maximize your email mail marketing results.

If you are annoyed by pop ups on other websites, you might initially be hesitant to add a pop up on your company website. You might think that it’s not going to work at all. But tests show time and time again that pop ups can be very effective for list building. Even though they might be annoying to you personally, or a member of your team, you are creating the list for your website visitors – not for you. Just like your website copy needs to be geared toward their needs, and not yours, using a pop up in their best interest in the right way to go.

Pop ups work for email opt ins for several different reasons:

They attract attention-Obviously when someone encounters a pop up when they are browsing through your website, it will attract attention. While a site visitor may look right past an opt in box in your sidebar, they cannot avoid seeing your pop up.

They target your offer-Opt ins can give you the opportunity to offer something very targeted to your visitors. With a pop up, you can offer a specific white paper or email course with a call to action.

They are actionable-When a site visitor is looking at your website, they have several different options, in addition to signing up for your newsletter. They can visit your blog, explore your services and take a number of other actions. But with a pop up, there’s only one choice – sign up or click the box closed.

If you are concerned about using too many pop ups or driving away site visitors, don’t be. Pop ups can be programmed to show up at specific intervals. For example, you can have the pop up show up once every three visits or once and then not again for 30 days.

You can also set pop ups for a specific time frame. Take a look at your analytics and see how long people are staying on your homepage before clicking to another page. If your visitors are staying on your homepage for an average of 40 seconds, you’ll want to have your exit pop ups come up 30 seconds after they first arrive.

Pop ups can be associated with specific web pages in your site. If you’re working to create a lot of traffic through Twitter or Facebook, you can add pop ups to your social media landing pages.

Using pop ups to boost your opt in number is worth testing. If you have a goal to boost your database and increase your sales, put your own personal feelings about pop ups aside and try them out for yourself.

Boomerang prides itself on its ease of use within the Salesforce CRM platform. That’s the number one statement we hear from users of BlastWizard for AppExchange. When you use our app, you’ll be able to launch a campaign from start to finish in less than 10 minutes. After downloading BlastWizard you will automatically receive 500 free email credits to test out the system.

Some of the major benefits to using BlastWizard within Salesforce are the send on behalf of the Salesforce record owner feature, managing and syncing unsubscribe requests back to the contact or lead, and a top tier delivery and bounce handling system. You can have multiple users for the same account or different subaccounts within one main account.

These powerful email marketing features work together to give you the best email marketing solution for your Salesforce account.  For questions or assistance, please contact us at sales@boomerang.com or 1-800-779-7792.

While customer relationship management systems, like Salesforce, help you manage relationships with existing and potential customers through a variety of platforms – email marketing is focused on connected with them in their inboxes. Integrating your email marketing solution into your CRM is a streamlined way to market to your potential clients and prospects in an enhanced way.

How to Convert Your CRM Leads into Email Marketing Prospects

Email marketing is a key tool in developing customer relationships and by integrating email marketing into your existing CRM solution, you can extend the life of those leads and make a bigger impact.

Email marketing reaches out and connects with prospects and customers long after they have left your site. With regular email marketing messages, you can reach out and develop a relationship with your prospects that leads to more sales.

As soon as a prospect enters your CRM system, you should send them a welcome message and start a regular series of messages that introduces them to the main benefits of your product or service. You can also share helpful information and articles that will increase their trust of your company and improve your relationship.

What to Look for in a CRM Email Marketing Solution

Email marketing from a CRM system should give you all of the options and functionality that you expect from a traditional email marketing platform. While many CRM solutions offer limited emailing capabilities, you need to use a platform that does more than simple text email message. Plain text email messages won’t get you the exposure or the engagement that you’re looking for from a comprehensive email marketing program.

Some of the critical areas of email marketing to look for are:

Message template creation

You should have the ability to create templated messages that include your company’s branding, social media icons and additional images.

List segmentation capabilities

When you are building a customer database, you are gathering a lot of information about your prospects. You should be able to put this information to good use with advanced segmentation. Sending specific email messages to specific clients that meet different criteria can help increase your open rates and improve results.

Email reporting and tracking

Sending out a simple message from your CRM won’t give you enough data to work with. When you use an integrated email marketing program, you can have access to the reports and data that you can use to plan for more email marketing success in the future.

Delivery technology

An integrated email marketing solution will have give you guaranteed delivery that you can rely on. It’s much more robust than emails sent through the CRM alone.

Using an email marketing solution that can integrate with your CRM system can save you time, create better results and make the entire marketing process more effective.