International Digital Marketing

Is it time to pull the plug and say farewell to your company website? The magazine AdAge has published some very worrying numbers concerning consumer behaviour and traffic between brands’ Facebook pages and brands’ official websites. It seems like websites are losing out to Facebook pages.

Looking at the chart below, we can see that very big brands gather millions of “likes”. For example Starbucks and Coca Cola have more than 10 millions of fans.

On the other hand, the traffic of the Coke U.S. website has decreased 40% in one year. Same story with the Oreo brand, which is the number 3 brand page on Facebook, with 8.7 million “likes” growing at a rate of 71 000 new fans each a day. The U.S. traffic of their website NabiscoWorld.com has decreased from 1.2 million in July 2009 to 321 000 in July 2010. Starbucks and its 12.7 facebook fans bring stable traffic to their website, yet taking in account their big international growth, should not the traffic be increasing instead?

What comes to the consumer behaviour, numbers do not get better. According to a new research by digital consultancy Beyond, 23% of consumers prefer receiving information from brands via Facebook, instead of a brand’s website (21%) or company blog (3%). This movement is encouraged by marketers who do not doubt anymore promoting their Facebook page instead of the official site. For example in France, certain brands such as Orangina and Sony sign their TV commercial with a “facebook.com/nameofthepromotion”. Other brands such and Ben&Jerry have announced they will simply stop emailing, using in the future Facebook newsfeed instead.

While Facebook is becoming the biggest relationship marketing tool for brands, it seems like that instead of increasing traffic to the company website, Facebook is actually absorbing it. Marketers across the globe are wondering whether their brand websites will disappear  and if there will still be a need for an official website in five years. Will the users still visit the company websites or will they only use Facebook and apps to check the news and offers?

“So is it time to turn off the web site?” asks Beyond’s MD EMEA Nick Rappolt.

No. The dependence between Facebook and websites will increase, but especially from a global point of view – there really is life beyond Facebook. Only promoting a product in one social platform decreases the possibilities to reach all the potential audience out there. Most of the world is still not on Facebook and having seen the rise and fall of various hot, “world changing” platforms it would not be the most brilliant idea to kill the only secure place brand has in the Internet – the official webpage.

From SEO perspective, using only Facebook Page would drop  search engine results considerably, pushing brand lower in ranking and decreasing amount of quality leads.

It also should not be forgotten that a marketer is still the master of his own website, controlling its structure, organization, design, content, SEO, marketing operations, customer data etc., while Facebook Page is defined…well by Facebook. Do brands really want to become fully dependent on Facebook and its rules, allowing it to control, restrict and have their say on the content, design and campaigns? I do not think so.

To stop the trend, start using Facebook to drive traffic to the official website. Create a Facebook competition which requires finding clues around your website, announce you will publish the competition winners in your official website, tell your fans about a special offer they can download from the website etc. It is also possible to integrate e-mail marketing with social media, increasing brand’s own customer database.

Facebook is just another way to promote an official website. More importance you give the platform, less power you have over your own campaigns. Do not let tail wag the dog.

Social Networks killing E-mail marketing? No, integration of the two is possible – and even recommendable. According to a study by GetResponse, e-mails containing social media sharing options such as Facebook or Twitter generated a 30% higher CTR than e-mails without them. What is even more promising is that the e-mails including at least three different sharing options had a 55% higher CTR. A very significant result, yet the study states that only 11.2% of e-mails currently offer three or more sharing options.

But why to limit to simple buttons in the end of the e-mails, when there are so many other possibilities to integrate e-mail marketing with social media? If just inserting few buttons can be so successful, imagine what other tricks can do!

Top seven tips to integrate e-mailing and social media:

1. Publish Facebook competition winners in the company newsletter

You acquire a double advantage, because besides of additional incentives of social media competitions, the Facebook community becomes part of your e-mail subscribers.

2.  Promote exclusive offers in Facebook and Twitter – that are only available for e-mail subscribers.

Subscribers want exclusive advantages for their loyalty. Reserving certain privileges for only this group, the perceived value of your e-mail subscribers program increases and gives motivation for other users to join. Since social media is highly viral, the information will spread quickly.

3. Include links to the best web versions of your Newsletters to Facebook and Twitter.

This tactic increases amount of people reading and clicking your Newsletter, even more than just adding “like” buttons.

4. Include “like” buttons in newsletters and promotions, but offer users a reason to use them.

A study by Nielsen Norman Group showed that students used much more the “share” option, when they got benefits from it. For example, “share this in Facebook and find out what your friends think about this product”, “Share this in Twitter so your friends know where to find you”

5. Encourage your subscribers to ask through Facebook or Twitter.

Unfortunately, the subscribers cannot answer commercial messages, so show them the dedication of your customer service by encouraging them to ask questions through social networks.

6. Include questions that were published in Facebook and Twitter in your e-mail and answer them.

If a company is active in social networks, it develops constantly a big base of frequently asked questions and answers that should be included in communications.

7. Create a mail group that includes Twitter followers and send them additional information through email.

Twitter followers appreciate the personal perspective the 140 characters offer, so offer them information that awakens their curiosity.

There has been talk about death of E-mail marketing after the emerge of social media, yet both ways of communication can complement each other and create considerably better campaign results. Another additional benefit of these strategies is creating a strong up-to-date database by encouraging social media users to implement their personal information into the company database.

Capturing social media users (Twitter followers, Facebook fans, bloggers…) personal data is complicated, because of the contact permission issues, yet if they give it voluntarily this can create a considerable amount of leads. Not to mention the possibilities the data capture brings for customer loyalization programs.

Hey small-to-mid-sized enterprise: are you sending out creative promotional emails, but somehow cannot make your audience to click? No worries, according to a study from email marketing technology firm GetResponse, promotional emails sent by SME marketers that include links to at least one social network have a 30% higher average click-through rate (CTR) than emails without the links. Mailing without any social network links have a 7,2% CTR while email messages with these links can have a CTR up to 9.4%.

More links, the better.

Promotional emails with only one social network link has an average CTR of 8.7%. Nice result, yet by only including two social network links the CTR increases up to 9.3%. It is a 7% growth from emails with only one link and 29% increase from emails with no links.

Wait, it is getting better! Emails with three or more social media links have an average 11.2% CTR. It is 20% higher than emails with two links, 28% higher than emails with one link and 55% higher than emails without links.

Which social media links to use?

According to the study, Twitter leads the way with a CTR of 10,2%, followed by Facebook (9,1%), MySpace (8,7%) and LinkedIn (7,2%). Digg is in the bottom with the lowest CTR (5.3%). However, if you are not targeting the US, the best way is to check which Social Media platforms/tools are the most popular in your market/country. For example, French do not like Twitter and user rate is very low: if the user does not have Twitter account, he is not likely to click. What comes to professional emailing, in Germany it is better to include link to Xing and in France to Viadeo, since these two are more popular than LinkedIn in these markets.

Get ahead of the competition

Surprisingly most SME Marketers do not use Social Media in Emailing. According to another study by GetResponse, only 18.7% of SME marketers include a link to their Twitter accounts in promotional emailing and only 13.5% had a link to Social Media networks. It means that by including Social Media links to your promotional emails you might obtain a competitive advantage and gain more audience than your competitors.