Leveraging Twitter for your Email Marketing Campaigns
returnonsubscriber.com recently posted a very interesting idea… Sending out your email campaigns via Twitter. It’s quite simple, actually:
First, create an email address ( for example). Then make sure your email address is aliased with the new one you just created for Twitter. This is the “subscriber” that you will use to track your Twitter activity.
Secondly, sign up to your email campaigns. When you send out your next email, will receive it. Make sure there’s a “view in browser” link at the top of the email.
Once you receive the email, click on the “view in browser” link, copy the browser URL and shorten it (using tinyurl.com).
Now, from your Twitter account, paste this tinyurl into a tweet and send it out! (example: Company Newsletter for January ‘09 - New Blogs, Recent Launches: http://tinyurl.com/asdfa89). As a rule of thumb, you should always incorporate the subject line of the email. With Twitter and their 140 character limit, you can get a little more descriptive than would with a subject line.
Next, log-in to your ESP and search for your “twitter@yourdomain.com” email address. From here you should be able to view the statistics for the specific message you just sent to this account, including the stats from the tweet.
Although it won’t tell you which Twitter users clicked on your link, it will help extend the reach of your message.
I will be trying this with our newsletter, The Lowdown (see the column to the left to sign up) at the end of the month. Stay tuned for the outcome of this little experiment!
If you use twitter, be sure to add mindcometgroup!
Posted by MindComet on Jan. 21, 2009
Comments
I have a few more tips on my blog about linking Twitter and email marketing. I recommended sending out individual tweets for every section of your email if it’s a newsletter. I find that Twitter is similar to email - you need to be relevant and concise in your messaging or you won’t get the “open”.
Posted by Chad H on 01/29/2009 01:09 AM
I thought this was a great idea and mentioned it in my email newsletter. http://twurl.nl/oke2ei I hope you don’t mind my mentioning you and this blog.
Posted by Sandi K. Solow on 01/29/2009 12:00 PM
If your email includes links to user admin functions - like updating email address, etc. - this will not work. In that case, you’d be better off creating an HTML version of your email and tracking it with your web site’s analytics tool.<BR><BR>If you think I am incorrect, please let me know as I have been trying to figure out a way to do this as well.
Posted by Anonymous on 01/23/2009 12:11 PM