• by Jess Nelson , December 9, 2015

Social media data can provide a wealth of customer data for email marketers, and has helped Visa significantly boost its marketing program, according to Jessica Williams, senior marketing insights and social media leader at Visa, who delivered the opening keynote at the MediaPost Email Insider Summit on Wednesday.

Email is a new marketing channel for Visa, per Williams. “In today’s world, one out of every three people has a social presence and are active on it globally,” Williams says. “People are sharing everything.”

Social media has traditionally been used by marketers for measurement purposes and evaluating how customers feel about a brand, often through social listening and keyword searches.

Williams suggests that email marketers should look to social before they send out emails as well.

“Word of mouth is more relevant than ever now with people recommending things on social,” Williams says. “Those recommendations are feeding your next movement. It’s an always-on data-feed. Global, all the time.”

Williams says that social data can provide a wealth of information on who a customer is, what they like, and what they’re going to do. It’s not just restricted to what someone posts online, either. Who a customer is following online, what they click on, what they share, and what influencers they look at can all provide more information that defines who an individual is.

Williams recommends that email marketers consider social media as a research tool to improve their email campaigns. Marketers should think about who they are trying to target on email, and then use social to learn more about their targeted audience and further define segmented campaigns.

Even the smallest things like language and what words customers expect to see can have a huge effect on email marketing, says Williams.

By leveraging social insights, Visa has been able to pinpoint what kind of deals customers might be interested in and educate readers about what types of products they might be having problems with.

Social data and customer research has also helped Visa further define its customer loyalty programs. One use-case scenario that Williams mentioned in her keynote address was how social helped Visa redefine what they considered an affluent audience to be. Williams’ social research produced the same results as a focus group, but was a fraction of the cost.

“The easiest way to start this is to go to your social media listening team,” Williams says in response to how email marketers can begin leveraging social data for insights into their marketing programs.

She says statisticians help with the number crunching but are not necessary.

“Just download the data and start running the numbers,” she says.