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Today Delivra publicly announced the availability of our new social media integration that I hinted at in an earlier post.  I wanted to go beyond the press release and our whitepaper to explain our philosophy of social media integration, and why this integration is so important to our clients.

Much has been written recently about whether the rise of social media marketing comes at the expense of email marketing.  Experts have staked out positions ranging from "email is dead; long live social media" to "email has staying power; social media is just a fad."  We take the more moderate view, that email vs. social media doesn't have to be a zero-sum game.  For Delivra, introducing social media integration isn't about hedging our bets against the demise of email.  No, we think social media integration has the potential to enhance the value of email marketing, rather than detracting from it.

As our marketing manager puts it, "email is the original social."  Consider the Facebook account.  I sign into it with...my email address.  I have an inbox in which I receive private messages from my friends, and I can also subscribe to notifications sent in bulk by people or brands that interest me.  There's a list of my contacts (think "address book") to whom I can publish content or links that I think might interest them.  Now, Facebook lays on top of these basic functions some unique features--I can't play Mafia Wars or Bejeweled Blitz against my friends via email--but at it's core, it has more similarity with email than is commonly acknowledged.  In fact, I have my own Facebook account configured to send copies of the most important notifications to...my Gmail account.

So we added social media integration to our email marketing platform, we approached it from the perspective that email and social networks are complementary--two sides of the same coin.  It's important to give marketers a simple way to insert HTML code for creating "share this" links in email content, and we've done that, as have many other ESPs.  But more important to us is collecting data about sharing of social network sharing and feeding that information back into our system, to make email marketing more effective.

For example, our integration tracks exactly which email recipients are sharing which emails, from which email campaigns, to which social networks, and how many people on each network--beyond the original recipient--viewed that content.  When an email message is shared to one of these networks, we're also tracking how many people on those networks--beyond the email recipient--have viewed it.  Not only is all of this data available to the user in reports, they can also segment their mailing list, to send targeted messages to individuals based on their sharing behavior.  If you have recipients who post links to your content on Twitter, you can follow up and invite them to become followers of your brand on Twitter.  If a particular recipient is generating a lot of page views--we call them "impressions"--of your content on Facebook, then you likely want to engage with her differently than you would the subscriber who hasn't opened your messages in months.  And if you notice that some of your mailings are being more widely shared than others, you have a basis for analyzing what gave those messages their viral appeal and applying similar techniques to future campaigns.

At Delivra, our core competency is email.  Always has been, always will be; that's why the tagline "We Know Email" is part of our logo.  But knowing email means more to us than just MIME-encoding, handling unsubscribes, and opening SMTP connections on port 25.  If there's a technology that has the ability to work alongside e-mail marketing and make it more valuable--whether that's social networking, video, or something else entirely--we're going to make it our business to know that, too.

Chris Broshears | Product Development

NOTE FROM MARKETING:  Chris's Bejeweled score is consistently at the top of the leader board here at Delivra regardless of how long I play the game!