For Moosejaw, Social + Email Is a Laughing Matter

There are about 2 billion people active social network users around the world today¹. The largest network, Facebook, alone has 1.44 billion monthly active users². These are staggering numbers. Yet, they still pale in comparison to email. There are an estimated 4.35 billion business and consumer email users today, and that number is expected to reach 5.24 billion by 2018³. Marketers and advertisers contemplating where to spend their digital budget shouldn’t take an either-or approach to social and email, though—they need to take an and-both approach.

This is the lesson shared by Moosejaw Mountaineering’ Beckley Stover and IBM Silverpop’s Loren McDonald during their Amplify 2015 session in San Diego last week, and one Moosejaw lives by with their unique brand of off-beat marketing. As McDonald put it, “Social’s power is really driving that engagement, driving that conversation about your brand. … Email’s greatest power is getting people to do things, driving people to convert, to take action.” For Moosejaw, that means making email and social work together in a synergistic relationship that too many companies are neglecting. The outdoor apparel and gear retailer knows that social and email aren’t competing channels, but two parts of a framework that includes sharing, engagement and growth.

During the session, Moosejaw’s Stover gave examples of the humor her company delivers via email and social to set itself apart from the competition. With one campaign featuring a Moosejaw truck driver posing naked (with a discreetly placed black censor bar) by his truck, the company saw its Facebook page engagement more than double for the entire week following the posts. Another campaign asked fans to count how many times the word “gumball” appeared in a crossword puzzle for a chance to win 1000 gumballs. Moosejaw promoted the contest to its email subscribers but announced the winner on its Facebook page, giving those email subscribers a “soft nudge,” as Stover said, to like the company on Faceboook. The campaign had absolutely nothing to do with outdoor gear, but it’s the type of engaging Moosejaw content that fans have come to expect and love, and one that makes expert use of multiple channels.

By learning from and planning for both social and email, Stover and McDonald said, and with some savvy cross-promoting, retailers can reap benefits greater than even the sum of utilizing the two channels separately. Here are ten tips McDonald shared to help companies realize their own multi-channel success:

10 Tips for Combining Social & Email to Drive Interaction

1. Add an email opt-in form on your company’s Facebook page.
2. Use social to promote email opt-ins.
3. Use email to promote social campaigns.
4. Promote your company’s social following via a welcome email.
5. Promote your company’s social following via a regular email.
6. Use popular Pinterest pins.
7. Promote videos and blogs via newsletters, etc.
8. Create fun and crazy emails that get talked about!
9. Use Facebook custom audiences for ad re-targeting.
10. Offer social options on unsubscribe/preference pages.

You can view the slides from this session on Slideshare:

 

1. Simon Kemp, “Digital, Social & Mobile Worldwide in 2015,” We Are Social, January 2015
2. Statista, “Number of monthly active Facebook users worldwide as of 1st quarter 2015 (in millions),” http://ift.tt/1uS13AG
3. The Radicati Group, Inc., “Email Statistics Report, 2014-2018,” April 2014

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