The Email Wars

Sure we all know that Twitter is a great way to increase your reach and deliver valuable content in a real time manner to those that are addicted to it like I am (I would wager many of you are as well). But are you using it in the best possible way to grow your email marketing programs? I have seen an uptick in companies using it is pre-promote the release of a newsletter telling people to opt in before the latest edition gets sent. I have seen companies feeding special versions of their newsletter out using it as well. And if they are smart they are also using it to feed individual articles from their newsletters to this channel. But recently I saw Nordstrom using it to engage with people for targeted newsletter growth.

Some time back I saw them use it to promote a men’s newsletter through a simple tweet. Smart idea. Now I am not sure if they have some way to segment based on gender (as this would be great if someone could do this from a communications tool into their follower steam) but it did catch my eye and made me want to look further as an email marketer.

I had assumed that I was going to land on a general newsletter sign up page and need to select the right lists to be on. Well I was pleasantly surprised at the fact that they took me right to a unique landing opt in page JUST for that men’s newsletter. Nice work. Now even if they did not have the ability to gender target using Twitter, they do have more of that data now by the implementation of this gender specific newsletter opt in page. Now they know that these users are male. What would have made this even better would have been if they would have either used the Twitter OAuth system to login via Twitter and capture that Twitter handle as well as an email address. By doing this they could have added this data to their user profiles in order to look for patterns and ways in the future to interact better via Twitter OR the email.

But none the less it was a great promotion and a well thought out use of targeting and landing based on gender. It opens up many ideas in my mind about the types of user data that email marketers that are giddy about social media to think about using. I would even advance the idea of similar campaigns in Facebook and employing Facebook Connect to get the 36 data fields (email is now one as well) when creating an opt in form. I have been toying with this idea for a while now since the recent addition of email as one of the marketer accessible fields in the Facebook Connect API.

Thinking about this idea, do you think that you could push your teams to try something new with implementation of social connection tools? Worth a test I think.