eCommerce Analytics

Let’s just admit it: small retailers are the biggest abusers of Twitter. For every @KidBean there are 1000 merchants who spam their followers every day with one offer after another. But engaging in social media is different than direct email. Social media takes time and resources, both of which are in short supply at small and mid-sized etailers. So instead of engaging in conversations, the temptation is to use scalable shortcuts — shortcuts which happen to drive followers away.

Which of these Twitter shortcuts do the most damage to your budding online community? To find out let’s take a look at what a popular Twitter anti-spam tool, The Twit Cleaner, classifies as bad Twitter behavior:

1. Posting nothing but links. Posting link after link can be ok under some circumstances, but it may also be a signal that your account is nothing but an advertising tool. If you’re going to post a lot of links make sure they’re going to varied content: pictures, blogs, and other sites besides your own.
2. Tweeting the same links all the time. We get it. We should really check out your fantastic offer. Maybe we missed the first time you posted it, or the second, but certainly not the 12th. Conventional wisdom says you should limit purely promotional tweets to one in 10. One in 20 is better.
3. Few re-tweets and no @replies. Is Twitter is a one-way channel only for you? Using Twitter for eCommerce is as much about listening to your customers as getting your message out to them. If your followers don’t feel that they are being heard they may decide to unfollow you and drop the conversation all together. Or worse, they may take their conversation elsewhere.
4. Not following your followers (?). I hesitate to call this a shortcut even if The Twit Cleaner does. On the one hand, it’s important to be listening to what your customers are saying and, to listent, it helps to follow. On the other hand, Twitter users who have lots of followers but themselves follow few people are considered highly credible and authoritative. Given a choice, I’d rather be authoritative. But there is a middle ground that lets you follow your most vocal, valuable, and/or influential customers. (Fun fact: @Zappos follows 390,000 people and is widely considered the creme de la creme of retail Twitterers. @GapOffical, which pumps out nothing but promotional spam, follows 7.)

These days even the most technophobic consumers have inboxes full of marketing from companies they have interacted with. As responsible marketers, we have ensured that these customers have opted in to our communications and we know that we must promptly remove them from our house file when they no longer want to hear from us. However, according to Marketing Sherpa’s Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008 (summary here), ensuring opt-in may no longer be enough to keep our company’s image clean.

In a survey of over 4000 consumers, half consider email to be spam if it arrives too frequently, even if it comes from a known sender. This has serious consequences for email marketers using “carpet-bombing” strategies to spur customers to purchase. Even if consumers have opted in and know a company well, they may come to think it as a spammer if they are receiving marketing emails every day or every week.

The sentiment that, regardless of permission, frequent email marketing is spam will only grow as inboxes become even more flooded. Marketers will be forced to migrate to a “surgical-strike” strategy where customers are targeted with highly personalized messages only at the most likely time to buy, and probably no more than once a month.

In an environment where consumer trust is hard to gain and can vanish with one misstep, nobody wants to be seen as a spammer. Unfortunately, the risk of marketing too frequently is now beginning to outweigh the benefit. If email marketers do not adapt through better targeting, they may find themselves relegated to the junk folder for good.