Today I gave a talk to Denmark’s FDIM group in Copenhagen (and I’ll give a similar talk tomorrow at Wednesday Live in Stockholm) on how to figure out what’s working and what’s not in the latest digital marketing techniques. In addition to walking through the basics of how to measure ROI, it also highlights several examples of real companies making money with these techniques. If you’re interested in the slides, check out “Measuring ROI in Social and Mobile Marketing.”
I got a great question after my presentation on how you can tell that your social media activities are turning people off. The answer is one that not too many people talk about, but it is common to any kind of direct marketing activity.
In catalog marketing, you always get people who ask you to take them off your list. In e-mail marketing, people unsubscribe. Social media marketing is no different, where you need to track the number of people who unfriend you on Facebook or stop following you on Twitter or unsubscribe to your blog or message board.
Just as you do with any direct marketing campaign, you’ll always get opt outs whenever you use your list. A low number of opt outs is inevitable no matter what you do, but if you start seeing large numbers, it’s time to take a close look at how you are using the list.
If you are sending blanket offers that are high-pressure and not very helpful, expect them to get rejected. In the slides is one case study where BMW got a 30% conversion rate for an MMS message suggesting that customers purchase snow tires. If that was all they did, they’d probably have gotten blocked by many recipients.
But BMW was much smarter than that. They timed the offer for the beginning of winter and they personalized it. They sent customers a suggestion for exactly what snow tires would be best for their particular BMW model. If your marketing is helpful or entertaining or saves people time, or all three, you’ll get very few opt outs. If you are getting opt outs, then your marketing is probably none of those and it needs to change.
So what kind of ROI do you get with social and mobile marketing? Or don’t you know?
