Dairy Queen recently used content and social marketing tools provided by a company usually identified for its email marketing prowess—Silverpop—to drive its fan club membership and boost store traffic.

It did so via a few tactics including:

• Customer Appreciation Day:  Dairy Queen wanted to drive traffic into its stores in January, a typically slow month. This email campaign was optional for all Dairy Queen franchises, and each franchise could choose one of three potential email offers. Fan club members received a coupon for the store they specified that was the closest to their home during sign-up.

• A campaign to increase the number of coupon prints via email to Blizzard Fan Club members by 300,000 and increase the number of fan club members overall by 300,000. During this push, Dairy Queen encouraged fan club members to recruit other new fan club members.
The end result was an increase in Dairy Queen’s fan club by one million members in nine months. Its Customer Appreciation campaign posted a 37% open rate and 83% click-through rate. Dairy Queen exceeded coupon prints by 37% in the summer campaign.

Email Marketers Continue to Merge with Social Media

Silverpop offers a range of tools to extend its original email marketing functionality to the social sphere–tools used in the Dairy Queen campaigns. Other vendors are racing to catch up.  To name one example, in December 2011 VerticalResponse made its first acquisition in the 11 years of its existence—it bought Roost, a social media marketing technology company, to step up its social media offerings for small business clients.

Other efforts in the push to integrate email marketing and social media in recent months can be seen by:

• iContact, which launched a social media marketing product to publish, schedule, and track social media marketing efforts on Facebook and Twitter either as stand alone campaigns or integrated with their email marketing campaigns.

• StrongMail, which partnered with Pontiflex to increase customers’ opt-in subscribers for their email, Facebook, Twitter and mobile app lists.

• VerticalResponse, which in June updated its social sharing tools with a "Total Social Reach" reporting feature that tracks which recipients share an email message via social channels, how the message is passed along and via which networks - the full social media "ripple effect."

Customer Engagement and Insight Top Social Media Benefits

One of the drivers behind this trend by email marketers to include social media in their menu of tools is that marketers are seeing value in social media beyond its original novelty. Some 55% of senior marketers told the CMO Council that social media has impacted their marketing operations by improving customer listening, engagement, and conversations.

This number was matched by the proportion who say that the channel has opened new avenues to gather and further market insights. The CMO Council released this study in partnership with Lithium.

Data from the survey also indicated that almost half of the marketers surveyed say that social media has increased the complexity of marketing planning and mix allocation, while 20% say it has improved customer intelligence.