It is a waste to only use data from social media for the messages on those platforms. Even if you cannot match customers in your internal database one-on-one with those on social media, you could still create profiles and use them to see which interests and preferences apply to these profiles. You could then use these interests and preferences for communication with customers with the same profile via other channels, such as e-mail marketing.
What Dutch e-commerce companies are already responding to is current events: 45 percent of the messages on Facebook were seasonal or event-related. On Twitter, this percentage was 34 percent, but on the other channels, these types of messages were not used. And that while social platforms offer the opportunity to know more about what moves fans and what makes their hearts beat faster.
In fact, customer data is the key to successful social marketing. By getting to know your customer better, you not only know what he or she likes to talk about at a certain moment, but also where he hospital mailing list or she likes to do it. Not quantity, but quality determines the success of a company on social media, because posts that exactly match a small group of people cost less and yield more than a mass message, where you can only hope that it lands somewhere.
About the research
We investigated the top fifty leading e-commerce companies in the Netherlands, identified with Prisync. Their digital marketing activities were analyzed for four weeks for three channels: email, mobile apps and social media.
For e-mail, an analyst signed up and analyzed the data. After registering his information, he analyzed the characteristics of the newsletter and the website according to known best practices. The analyst also tracked and reviewed all incoming e-mails and newsletters that followed his registration.
For mobile apps, a study was set up on an Android mobile platform. The analyst mapped the available apps, installed them and logged in (if possible) to analyze their characteristics. Data from the apps and the messages that were received were tracked and analyzed.
For social media, the analyst examined the social activities of companies and noted the participation on the different platforms. He analyzed the volume of activity, the type of content shown, the customer reactions and whether anything was done with season, events and holidays.