Incorporating List Hygiene Into Your Social Marketing
By Spencer Kollas, director of delivery services, StrongMail Systems

As budgets get smaller for most marketing departments, we are all looking for new ways to get the most bang for our buck. Lately, there has been a lot of press around social marketing, and the potential it can have for companies in reaching their client base.

If I had any question about how mainstream social media has become, it's now gone after seeing two back-to-back commercials that featured social networks while writing this article. The first was from a car company making the claim that once you buy a car from it, you will want to tell all of your friends through Twitter, Facebook, and any other social networking site you happen to frequent. The second was a Verizon Wireless commercial about its new small netbook, which just happened to have Twitter displayed in its browser.
 
Given social media's prominence in everyday society, it's not surprising that many marketing departments are looking at social marketing initiatives as a way to build their customer retention programs, keep their customers involved with their brands, and engage potential new customers. But how do you continue to reach your customers effectively, and build your databases while still following best practices within social media and email marketing?

An important thing to remember is that much like email marketing, social marketing programs take effort and focus. If your marketing department doesn't put the resources behind these efforts, they could hurt your brand more than help it. Monitoring what your customers are saying about you across key social networks is also important. That way, if someone says something negative about your company, you can quickly respond and make sure your customers know that you are listening, that they are important to you—and that you're on top of the latest communication channels.

First things first, you must know the best practices and how they can both positively and negatively affect the delivery and acceptance of your marketing messages. As most email marketing professionals already know, maintaining proper list hygiene is key to good delivery. However, as email marketers turn to social media to help build their lists, there needs to be an even tighter focus on keeping lists clean with active customers who have clearly opted in to receive your messages. As in any marketing program, knowing your customers and setting proper expectations is key.

One of the most important items to remember when considering social marketing is how you collect customer data. During the collection process, it is still important to make sure that you set proper expectations. Let all potential customers know, and understand, how often they should expect to hear from you, in what ways you will communicate with them, and how they can unsubscribe from further communications.

While social media can be a very effective tool for building your email marketing database, there are some things you must consider. If you collect email addresses during the social marketing process and plan to use them later for marketing purposes, make sure consumers are aware of your intention to do so, and don't forget to send them a welcome message. This message will do a number of things. It will validate the email address, set proper expectations for future email communications, and allow users to unsubscribe from future messages if they do not wish to receive emails from your company.

I covered a lot of the list hygiene best practices in a previous iMedia article; however, there's a new wrinkle in the list hygiene process that is being caused by the economy, thanks to what I like to call the "layoff factor." This is when a current subscriber used a work email to opt in to your messages and has since been laid off without any further access to that account. This is just another example of how important good list practices are, as well as proper bounce management, which I have also addressed in a previous article.

The importance of list hygiene cannot be overlooked as an essential item for both social and email marketing programs. By employing the practices mentioned above, you can make great strides in improving your deliverability rates and safeguarding your reputation for all of your marketing programs. Of course, it's just one aspect of your marketing programs, so make sure to think the full process through. In doing so, you should see your marketing ROI and effectiveness soar.

---Source: iMedia Connection July 28, 2009 (http://www.imediaconnection.com). Spencer Kollas is director of delivery services for StrongMail Systems (www.strongmail.com).