What is a contact strategy? A contact strategy is a marketing program that sends appropriate messages to relevant groups of customers according to a strategic schedule.
Who needs a contact strategy? Any brand that is serious about using a particular channel to generate income.
Most brands that live or die through direct marketing understand the importance of a contact strategy. Brands that rely heavily on the postal channel tend to focus on building an effective contact strategy because of the high costs of paper, printing, and postage. Yet I’ve seen that many brands that use email and social media to reach their customers don’t focus much on creating a disciplined contact strategy. This is a huge mistake. It is the difference between a random shot gun approach and a scientifically engineered process. Which do you think will produce the results you want?
Having a direct response background, I look at social media as the latest generation direct marketing channel. I use social media’s predecessors–email and postal messaging–as models for designing a strategy. I’ll show you what I mean.
Learning from catalog brands
When I worked in the print catalog world, we focused heavily on RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) in determining who received a catalog when. In other words, the time of the customer’s last purchase, how often they purchased, and how much they spent drove our decisions on which customers we should invest marketing dollars on. These indicators were so reliable you would be willing to bet on them.
Email response indicators
In our email strategies for clients, we add another component to this model. We bring into the equation when the customer last opened or clicked on an email message. Although email is a low cost channel, you can do harm to your list and leave sales dollars on the table without this kind of approach.
Designing social media contact strategies
I like to think of Inner Architect as being a pioneer in developing contact strategies for the social media channel. Here are some things you should consider in creating a more disciplined approach to your social marketing program:
This is exciting new territory! Please don’t hesitate to contact me if I can answer any questions.
The SocialMediaToday.com article “Twitter in a Corner- Facing Huge Challenges” is an interesting piece about Twitter’s goals to monetize and survive an uncertain future. Twitter’s baby steps into advertising and their deliberate roll out strategy are the initial focus. The piece correctly identifies Twitter’s great concern to preserve the user experience, the possible alienation of users due to the new advertising initiatives, and the ongoing need to monetize the business model.
Twitter’s Future: Abandoning the Network?
Author Robert Bacal makes three assertions that essentially outline a scenario that we do not believe to be completely true:
Twitter’s Future: Counterpoint
More Reasons Why People Will Continue to Adopt
Inner Architect Founder & CEO Susan Hanshaw and Business Director Dean Guadagni have a combined 7 years blogging experience. Together we have written over 2,000 articles focusing on direct marketing, social media, blogging, social networking, and a plethora of subjects related to Web 2.0.
SearchEnginePeople.com
We are proud to announce our acceptance as guest contributors to SearchEnginePeople.com Canada’s “largest and most trusted Internet marketing company.” Search Engine People services 300 clients worldwide including many of Canada’s top brands. President and CEO Jeff Quipp and blog Editor Ruud Hein are the driving forces behind SearchEnginePeople’s blog.
Inner Architect Features on SearchEnginePeople.com

In 1 Simple Ingredient for All Your ROI Needs, I discussed using a key code system to track the performance of individual social media efforts. While this practice is a great step towards tracking the sales performance of the social media channel, it is not enough if you truly want to learn how your social relationships are influencing sales in the long term.
What does it mean to measure impact on long term sales?
Think about it this way. Evaluating long term impact means there is going to be a starting point, a building up of history, and then a point where you measure what has happened since the starting point.
Starting point: Date of first sale
Building of history: Transactions made over a period of time
Measurement point: Recording cumulative sales that have occurred since the date of first sale
How do you apply this analysis to social media?
The goal here is to look at the buying history of the customers you have social relationships with versus those you don’t. This requires that you:
In the example above, sales to Twitter followers is 14 points higher than average and 20 points higher than customers where there is no social relationship. To fully load this analysis to get a total ROI, you would need to load in the costs associated with social media. I’ll save this discussion for a future post. Please leave a comment or email me if you have any questions in the meantime.
In the couple of years that I have been involved with social media marketing, I have seen much correlation between what what works for driving engagement and what works to drive a direct marketing response. I have become convinced that there is one area of focus that is sorely overlooked by brands seeking to build a vibrant and constantly growing Facebook community. There lacks an attention to the influence of copy.
Over the years I have pushed hundreds of millions of offers out to consumers and learned that what drives response holds true to the old folk wisdom—
I have seen numerous tests where a different set of words or something else said or not said can produce a variance that can amount to a huge pile of cash to the bottom line.
Translating this idea to today’s social media world, most Facebook marketers haven’t quite realized that the Wall is a vehicle for generating response and that post copy should be formulated with care. Don’t let the real-time nature of the platform fool you into thinking that your messages should not require some planning.
5 tips for writing effective Facebook updates:
I’d love to hear any tips you have to add!