• by Neil Rosen , September 11, 2012

Email marketing is most effective when content is sent in a timely manner to customers and prospects based on specific actions they take. That’s CRM at its finest, after all: responding to the customer’s actions and expressed desires.

It’s also why shopping cart abandonment emails work so well: they make it easy for prospects to complete an interrupted action by responding to the needs of the customer. The same is true for website remarketing campaigns to people who visit the website but never get to shopping cart pages. By reminding these prospects of current offers, it’s likely you can nudge them back to the site, from there to the shopping cart, and, voilà: another sale.

We call campaigns performing more than fives times better than standard, segmented, and targeted email campaigns “Mighty Mouse” campaigns: they go to small populations but have far more power than other email deployments. Both shopping cart abandonment and website remarketing campaigns are examples of Mighty Mouse campaigns.

Email campaigns triggered by social actions fit this category very nicely, driving as much as 10 times (or more) revenue than standard, segmented, and targeted email campaigns. Triggering an email when customers visit your Facebook page, watch one of your videos on YouTube or Vimeo, read your blog, re-tweet your tweet, post one of your images on Pinterest, and so on, is the perfect way to engage your customers and prospects at the right time (when they are known to be online) with relevant content. It’s CRM at its best: delivering the most relevant content based on the customer’s own actions.

From the customer’s point of view, you’re providing the best service on the internet, because you are responding immediately to their expressed needs.

It’s in your best interests to identify people who interact with your company socially:

1. These are your most engaged customers, who over time will generate the most lifetime value for your company. This group of people should always be given preferential opportunities to interact with your company.

2. These are people who are very socially engaged, so they are absolutely the primary group you want to target for new customer acquisition programs, like “share” and F2F” campaigns.

3. These people generate high response rates to your emails, such as delivering consistently over 50% open rates, that they have the ability to actually improve your online reputation and inbox delivery across all of your email campaigns.

The technology exists to interact with your customers at this level of engagement. You do it by creating your own social portal that mimics everything you are doing socially on a single micro-site that’s integrated with your website. Imagine everything social in a single portal!

Your engaged customers and prospects love it because they get to see everything your company is doing socially in a single place without having to go to multiple social websites. And you can even tie in message boards and direct-response links to engage your customers even further, making them feel like they’re an important part of your company.

You can pixel all the feeds in your portal, so that you track when your customers are watching company videos, viewing your Facebook page, pinning your images on Pinterest, and on and on, and then use that information to trigger emails that thank your customers for engaging with the company, emails that suggest further actions and provide valuable content they can share with friends, and offer rewards that can be redeemed at your website.

Triggering emails from social activity is the next level of Mighty Mouse email marketing: low-volume, high-CRM email campaigns that generate tremendous activity and revenue … and put smiles on the faces of your customers.