Despite some saying email has departed for that big social network in the sky, the latest email marketing statistics by Epsilon Email Marketing Research Center show it's alive and well. That said, marketers have to work much harder creating more relevant, compelling, and personalized content that's sent to segmented audiences, as well as add social to the mix of marketing tools to keep up the click-through rates.
"Businesses are finding it harder and harder to reach their customers through email. It is a very noisy channel," says Austin Evarts, co-founder and CEO of GoChime, an up-and-coming startup that takes users' email marketing and CRM strategies social. "By matching our clients' email lists and segments to Facebook profiles and reaching their customers on Facebook with an ad, we allow them to break outside of the noise."
"We soon realized that our customer's first-party data was much more valuable, and email was an obvious transition," Evarts says of the 2011 Techstars Seattle grad. "Our clients now use GoChime for customer retention andcustomer acquisition. For customer retention, we make it easy to target the people who didn't open their most recent email campaign. On average, this increases overall customer list reach by two to three times. For customer acquisition, we make it easy to create lookalike audiences of good customers, such as those who opened or clicked an email, or those who have previously purchased your product. We've seen returns on ad spend up to 20 times using this approach."
Evarts points out Journelle, a New-York based designer lingerie store, who used GoChime to create a lookalike audience and run ads to an email segment of everyone who has purchased from them. They reached a 20-time return on ad spend targeting this lookalike audience. He says that means for every $1 they spent on ads, new customers were spending $20 on Journelle lingerie.
"Customers only reach on average 20 percent of their customer lists via email," Evarts says. "Once you securely sync an email audience through GoChime, we make sure that audience is updated in real time on Facebook. If something changes on the ESP side, we change that on the Facebook side. This saves a massive amount of time because otherwise people need to export and upload .csv files every time their data changes, and for most of our customers, their data changes a lot."
You can connect your first 1,000 contacts free. Then pricing starts at $30 monthly up to $2,500 a month for 1 million contacts. Whether or not you're on the free plan, it includes unlimited campaigns, hands-on support, real-time custom audiences, and free integrations with partners like HubSpot and Constant Contact. Facebook advertising comes at an extra cost.
While GoChime makes it easy to reach your customers on Facebook, they'll soon be integrating with other platforms, including LinkedIn and Twitter. Having just broke the 600-customer mark; the New-York based startup is so far meeting its most important goal, which is growth. And Evarts believes they can triple that in the next six months.
"People are just now coming around to the idea of bringing their data to Facebook and reaching their customers there. I expect a lot more of this to happen, especially in the SMB space. GoChime will be the place to bring your data and automatically reach your customers across most of the major social channels."