Silverpop has announced new product features that will help marketers better integrate their social, email, mobile and local marketing strategies. As it does so it dubs the four-pronged channels mocial – a buzzword that is gaining traction in the industry as it reflects their ongoing melding.
The product enhancements it has announced include new social-sharing options to its Engage product, which allows email recipients to promote messages to their Facebook friends via “like” and “recommend” buttons and suggest a list of additional Twitter accounts for a contact to follow after they have shared content. All of this, of course, helps the marketer extend deeper into the contact’s social network. Silverpop has also added StumbleUpon and Xing to the list of networks to which email recipients can share content.
Silverpop is also now offering email opt-in via SMS message and location-based marketing capabilities via a FourSquare “To Do Button” option. These new features are part of Silverpop’s most recent product release, Engage 8.3.
Growing Trend
Silverpop, of course, is hardly the only email marketing vendor to offer such integrated features, although it does position itself as among the first. The trend of integrating email to social and mobile and now, local, advertising has been watched carefully for more than a year. In its 2011 marketing trends report, StrongMail found that email marketing (65%) and social media (57%) were expected to be the top areas of investment this year, followed by Search (41%).
Furthermore, the most important email marketing initiatives for 2011 are increasing subscriber engagement (52%), improving segmentation and targeting (49%), and integrating social media and email marketing (43%). On the latter point, a full 71% have already integrated email and social, or plan to, in 2011.
Other vendors that have tweaked, or more, their offerings to address this trend include:
- iContact, which [PDF] recently integrated social tools for its iContact email marketing product. The company also upgraded its iPhone application for mobile email marketing campaigns.
- MailChimp and WeReward, a check-in tool, which partnered to help retailers acquire new customers through MailChimp’s email marketing tool.
- Lyris, which introduced Social Fusion Marketing, an application that integrates social media with email marketing, search engine marketing and search engine optimization.
- Experian Marketing Services, which added social media and mobile-friendly functionality to its Experian CheetahMail’s email marketing technology.
- Delivra, which integrated its feature set with TabSite by Digital Hill Multimedia, thus giving Delivra customers a way to create an email sign-up form in their Facebook Fan Page.
Article source: http://www.marketingvox.com/its-a-mocial-world-049207/