Looking forward

There are a few dozen reasons to be excited for 2011 in tech. I’ll focus on one: Better targeted email marketing campaigns.

“Nearly every major announcement and R&D trend in the social industry revolves around adding data or layers of connectivity. Just in the past few weeks you have Facebook integrating e-mail, PostRank integrating Facebook data, Bing integrating Facebook data, Cotweet integrating with ExactTarget…” -Jesse Stanchak, SmartBlog on Social Media- “Why 2011 will be the year of social media convergence”

Email and Facebook Marketing

If we could send emails only to customers who clicked a particular shortlink on Twitter, this would allow for very customized marketing. However, it needs to be proven that the time spent tailoring individual emails to different consumer segments would be worthwhile. I look forward to being able to send a Facebook message to my Page’s followers who have visited a particular page on my website. It is almost overwhelming the degree of detail proposed here, however. Rather, the overwhelming part is ascertaining the threshold at which the ROI from heavy analysis and calculation of segments and expected conversion rates becomes too minute to be relevant anymore.

If you can lower your cost per acquisition by using (hard cost = free) social media instead of pricy OOH advertising, for instance, you can probably only chip away at that number so much before the burden of sifting through your SM data raises it again. What I’m getting at, more specifically, is that I am tired of using ten different services to manage social media.

You have your eating disorder Twitter follower management services (binge and purge). You have post automation. You have auto welcome DMs to rotate and send. You have graphs tracking follower growth. You have Google Analytics with hits to your website and where they came from.  You have email campaign results with open rates and clicks. You have Facebook Insights.  Etc.

2011, let’s merge it all.  And hey, if anyone out there knows a service that already does this (and by service I mean a dot com or SAS, not a consultant or agency or individual workhorse tasked with conversation monitoring) by all means, comment. Note: I am partial to sendible.com of late, but it doesn’t meet all the above requirements.