Social media and email marketing: Shopflick finds its niche
With less competition and hyper-targeted consumers you can build more traction within these communities. Many retailers already have a thriving presence on niche sites, they just haven't bothered to tell their email subscribers.
Test the waters with 45 retailers: {view list here}
Out of 45 companies integrating social media with email marketing, I tallied up which social sites they feature:
| Niche social media in email | |
|---|---|
| sample of 45 retailers emails | |
| 40 | |
| 30 | |
| Myspace | 11 |
| Blog | 10 |
| Digg | 8 |
| YouTube | 4 |
| Flickr | 4 |
| Delicious | 3 |
| RSS | 3 |
| Stumbleupon | 2 |
| Super Niche - 1 link in 45 emails | |
| 1 | |
| Kirtsy | 1 |
| Harmony Central | 1 |
| Kaboodle | 1 |
| Stylehive | 1 |
| ThisNext | 1 |
| Virb | 1 |
| Yahoo Shopping | 1 |
| Yelp | 1 |
Musicians Friend promotes their presence on Harmony Central, the #1 community for musicians. T'shirt retailer Threadless sometimes add a link to Virb or Kirtsy (testing popularity with email subscribers?).
ShopFlick: {view email here}
Shopflick an online video-shopping marketplace - think QVC meets Etsy - added social links to their newsletter in mid-January this year. Angela Lee, a member of the Shopflick marketing team told me,
"It seemed a no-brainer to connect to our audience through social networking sites that they visit. We also wanted to build our fan base on the sites, and saw our newsletter subscriber base as a natural place to grow there."
What makes Shopflick unique is that besides the big 3 (+ Youtube) they incorporate niche sites, Stylehive, ThisNext and Kaboddle in their newsletter. Seven links in total, the most of any of the 45 companies I tracked.
"Since we're into fashion & shopping, we felt having a presence in shopping social sites would be important. Kaboodle and ThisNext are the major players in the game, having the largest audience size, however, we do track other sites on the side like Chictini and Indiepublic .
Facebook and close 2nd Twitter remain Shopflicks highest SNS traffic drivers. Though evidence suggests niche sites require less traffic to produce a higher percentage of revenue and their popularity is on the rise.
"The main point of our newsletters are to drive traffic back to shopflick.com...On the flipside, our social profiles are to alert fans of the deals and products on shopflick.com, with newsletter sign-up as a secondary tactic."
How many social media links are enough?
The Facebook/Twitter combo is the most popular of the 45 companies I looked at.
