Marketers can inspire (and incentivize) customers to become true brand advocates while building and strengthening the relationship.

1. Growing Brand Loyalty and a Subscriber
Base through Social Media Marketing
Jason Warnock
VP, Intelligence Products
1.877.937.6245 | sales@yesmail.com | www.yesmail.com
Social media is supposed to help brands achieve the following and more:
• Increase reach: social sharing amplifies the number of people exposed to brand marketing
• Improve brand trust: consumers consider word-of-mouth/peer-to-peer messages more credible
than messages from brands
• Boost the number of brand advocates: marketers should be able to establish and nurture
relationships with customers to build loyalty
“Marketers can inspire (and incentivize)
customers to become true brand advocates
while building and strengthening the
relationship.”
The impact of social media by itself has been challenging to quantify. The success and value of email
marketing, on the other hand, have been relatively easy to measure. Integrating social media into a
brand’s email strategy can prove very helpful in identifying consumers who share brand content and
effectively tracking the revenue they generate for the brand. Marketers can then create incentive-based
campaigns that influence these valuable subscribers and multiply brand reach while acquiring new
subscribers.
What’s the role of social media in digital marketing?
How can marketers measure their return on social media?
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2. 1.877.937.6245 | sales@yesmail.com | www.yesmail.com
1. Pinpoint sharing subscribers— Once you determine which subscribers are sharing your content,
you can determine the business outcomes generated by each subscriber. To do this, you can use email
to social attribution technology—with its tracking capabilities, you’ll gain insight into shares, new
subscribers, revenue, and other results on an individual subscriber basis. This will enable you to target
your brand’s most valuable subscribers and measure ROI of your social campaigns.
2. Share insights with subscribers— Give subscribers visibility into the activity they’re generating so
they can monitor their progress toward earning rewards.
3. Decide on reward offerings: Develop an organized system with goals subscribers have to achieve
in order to gain rewards. The prizes have to be valuable to advocates, and offset the time and effort
they expend. Rewards can range from free shipping to free products or the crowd favorite (read:
most effective incentive)…discounts. For instance, advocates who get five more subscribers on board
through social sharing could receive a 10 percent discount code for their next purchase. As subscribers
move forward in the rewards program and generate even more new subscribers, the discount could
get steeper. Even if you offer a different type of reward, the value of incentives should increase as
subscribers progress through the advocate stage in order to keep them motivated to share.
Ultimately the possibilities for reward packages are endless, and the cost of offerings like discounts is
chump change compared to the typical cost to acquire a new subscriber.
Long-term brand engagement, much less brand advocacy, can be hard for a brand to achieve and
maintain. The brand has to switch from short- to long-term incentives as the advocate’s relationship with
the brand progresses.
When coordinating your social media strategy with your email strategy, be sure to factor the cost of
loyalty rewards into your budget.
1. Run several test campaigns to gauge how many of your email subscribers will share a campaign with
their social media followers.
2. Identify the number of advocates that will engage with your brand’s emails. A simple formula:
Campaign Volume * Advocate % = Advocate Subscriber #. This will give you insight into how many
advocates you have to work with for each email campaign.
3. Estimate your brand’s advocacy buy per campaign by multiplying the number of advocate subscribers
by the average reward per advocate. For instance, the advocacy buy for a campaign would be $10,000
if your brand anticipates 1,000 advocate subscribers per campaign and the average incentive for each
advocate is a $10 discount.
As marketers track and learn more about advocate subscriber behaviors, they should optimize their
reward strategies to maintain relationships for the long-haul.
How can brands plan their budgets around incentives for advocates?
What are the steps to turning subscribers into influencers?
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3. 1.877.937.6245 | sales@yesmail.com | www.yesmail.com
Jason Warnock is a seasoned veteran of digital marketing. After creating
successful email applications for Canadian bank CIBC (2004), Jason initiated and
managed Deliverability Operations for Digital Connexxions (2006) implementing
several key strategies for major publishing clients. After a successful acquisition
of Digital Connexxions in 2006 by infoUSA, Jason proceeded to become Director
of Deliverability for Yesmail (2007) followed by VP of Deliverability Services for
Infogroup (2011).
Jason has transformed Infogroup Deliverability into an industry leading solution
through enhanced offerings of technology and client services. Jason has
designed successful technical and business strategies for several large Fortune
500 companies including: HP, Coke, Kodak, Facebook, eBay, Ancestry.com, and
United Airlines. Jason is a recognized industry leader in competitive marketing
intelligence through his work in co-founding Market Intelligence (formally
TheMarketingNetwork.com). Market Intelligence is a revolutionary new platform
that enables Marketers with the instant ability to track all digital deployments
of their competitors across Email, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and SMS in near
real-time. The exciting new platform has received praise from Fortune 500
companies, Government officials, and leading Research Groups.