Email Eats Social Media
- by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, June 30, 2009
The deal gives StrongMail customers a method to publish and track content on social media sites Facebook and MySpace, among others. Marketers will have an option to send messages directly into the email boxes of Facebook fans, as well as track the interaction with messages. Email marketers can build the list. The technology gives specific data about who shared what content and clicked on the links.
The two companies have worked together in the past. PopularMedia has been a StrongMail customer since 2006. And earlier this month StrongMail introduced Influencer, based on PopularMedia's product Influencer Ads that enable marketers to introduce social components to email campaigns.
"Marketers are struggling to find out where social fits into the business," says Ryan Deutsch, StrongMail's VP of strategic services and market development. "Marketers are throwing up Facebook pages, but nothing is happening. We talk to a lot of marketers who have Facebook pages with thousands of fans, but they struggle to determine the return on investment."
Marketers do not have to build an entire new program around social media to drive viral campaigns, Deutsch says. They can introduce sharing components in email programs to test how viral marketing can become.
Deutsch declined to reveal revenue for each company, or the number of employees at PopularMedia.
StrongMail -- which supports more than 450 customers in the United States, Europe and Asia-Pacific -- boasts six consecutive quarters of revenue growth. Deutsch says the company does not expect any layoffs at either StrongMail or PopularMedia.
Deutsch says the vision is for StrongMail to become a "digital marketing solutions company" that can support customers in multiple channels. PopularMedia's social media technology adds another core layer to the business offering. PopularMedia customers include Limited Brands, Victoria's Secret, Bath & Body Works, Kohl's, and Dow Jones.
