Despite social media currently being in the spotlight email newsletters remain the Internets best tool for supplementing a website. A website and a newsletter complement each other. In some respects you can think of the two in tandem operating like a Facebook fan page or other social media platform. Users can both find the fan page online to ‘pull’ and do research at their pace, and be ‘pushed’ news and updates at a time of your choosing.

These days most (but not all) email contact is done by request, that is you provide mechanisms for users to subscribe to notifications and updates, and they choose what they want to hear and how, examples might be:

> New posts on a Blog
> New images matching specified keywords
> Replies to the comment I just posted
> All images posted in the “food photography > Asian food gallery
> Important site announcements only
>Special offers when they are available

Provide these ‘notifications’ by opt-in email and RSS if you can. In fact provide everything you can via RSS, even if you think that your buyers are not the kind of people who know what a ‘feed reader’ is. There are plenty of bright sparks online who will take any RSS feed of data they can and turn it into some useful service – a service hopefully with your name all over it, or at least things you have posted. This is not theft, it’s syndication, it’s something you want, it means anything you write or images you post have a broader reach. Even if sites syndicate your content without attribution to you as the source you can still liberally sprinkle your posts with links back to your own site or watermarks.

There is still life left in traditional mailing lists and auto-responders, but they are not easy to operate successfully, I’d leave them until you have plenty of visitors/followers, getting people to part with their email address and opt in is difficult but can work well if you dangle a carrot of some kind when they confirm their subscription. Look at mailchimp for a free list up to 1000 users. It’s hard to get more than 10% of users to even click on an email, less to convert them into a purchase that way. If you want to keep people up-to-date touch via email then I’d suggest letting them subscribe to a feedburner email and then look into hosting your own mailing list. Self hosting is a serious and somewhat fraught undertaking if you have more than say 1000 subscribers, but may be the only way unless your list can justify the price of a mail-out at a hosted service – for the pennies involved in microstock the sums often don’t add up unless you have very highly targeted audience with high click through and conversion rates.

Timing
There are two types of message – the instant ‘notify me when this is updated’ (request messaging) and the ‘please subscribe to our newsletter’ list (permission marketing). Obviously the request messages / rss etc need to be as instant as possible, but there is also value is offering users digests of information to receive weekly or even daily. If you have a large enough mailing list you can justify writing tailored content each week or month to update contacts with “what’s happening”, it is however a hard juggling act to balance the frequency and content of these updates, too much and users will unsubscribe, to specific or too generalized information and they will also leave. Take it from me and anyone else living outside of the US, when we receive a message about Black Friday or some other US holiday, it’s usually greeted with “what the hell is that?” and “Well it looks like I’m so special to them, they cared enough to not even bother working out that I don’t live stateside”. This brings us neatly on to segmentation.

The 90 day rule
Marketing edict states that you should keep in touch with your contacts at least every 90 days. Any less and your subscribers start to forget who you were and think your emails are spam. Staying in touch too frequently unless your messages are really interesting also risks losing your subscribers as they feel they are being pestered by marketing junk. Monthly newsletters are fine providing you have something good to say, weekly can also work if you have a weekly special deal, or digests of the weeks posts.

Segmentation
A good email marketing service of software allows you to segment your contacts; this is can be vital to keeping subscribers happy. Good titles and copy are still important, but with segmentation you will deliver a message that a reader finds interesting, this is the type of message that gets read and hopefully acted on. Scattergun emails to everyone can work and may be the only thing you can budget for, The same message to all users can have negative effects, those not interested in them won’t open, may just leave them in the spam bin (a bad thing) or even worse if you send out a series of emails they are not interested in they may mark it as spam or simply filter everything you send to them. Getting your emails actually delivered to someone’s inbox is a fight, the internet is infested with spam emailers, and there are quite a lot of technology hoops to jump through if you don’t use a paid email marketing service.

Revolving Door of Image Buyers
When microstock opened up a new market for casual buyers of stock images it also introduced a problem, rather than having clients who regularly purchased images (those clients do still exist) most of the ‘new’ buyers were individuals who buy occasionally, seldom, and even only just once. Don’t spend too much time keeping in touch with those kinds of prospects or you’ll soon be penniless – if you can do it in volume with very little overhead then fine. Try getting subscribers to tell you what they do for a living if they signup for updates, that will tell you which category they fit into, professional designers and image researchers are to be cherished, amateurs and interns who drew the short straw are somewhat less useful to milk for repeat sales. It’s also useful to collect demographics of the industry the subscriber works in or is working for.

This guide will offer substantial suggestions for developing a practical approach to measure your social media marketing return on investment (ROI).

You begin by posting to Facebook and Twitter to interact with your fans and followers. You think your actions are OK, but are not sure how to determine the impact of your efforts and the ROI.

Counting how many Twitter followers and Facebook fans you have is a way to jump in and start measuring your ROI. A slightly more advanced method is to measure Facebook likes and Twitter retweets. A better approach to ROI measurement that is goal-based will help you understand the “how” behind the “why” of the marketing initiatives you implement.

Many internet marketers will focus on acquiring contacts first, strengthening their brand, then how to create more sales. Any return on investment in social media marketing should be tied in with the goal of your social media messages and your presence online.

Survey Results

A typical purchasing process starts with becoming aware of a brand, then showing enough interest to become a contact, and finally, deciding to make a purchase.

Step One – Strengthen Your Brand

The total of all social interactions regarding your product drives your brands’ success. You need other people talking about you and your products with their networks so these interactions do not just involve your efforts alone.

Attention

Attention revolves around the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Potential customers have to be engaged with your brand. It is not sufficient to just have a large group of social media followers.

Reach

When you engage in social media, how many people can you reach to interact with? Your reach will grow as people want to hear more if you offer content that interests people and gets noticed. Marketers claim it is analogous to your brand reach which will be equal to your email marketing list size.

Every piece of your content posted should be so good your fans and followers will want to share it with their friends which is known as viral marketing. More people see your content when they do this.

Engagement

What your audience is saying about your brand is known as brand engagement. Engagement includes both content engagement and brand engagement.

Content

One way to measure content engagement is by measuring social media shares (i.e., likes or retweets) which shows how engaged your audience is with your content. If your content clicks with your audience you can better understand the level of your content engagement. In an example, were your visitors connected with your content well enough to share it with their group of friends?

Step Two – Acquire Contacts

Understanding your list of social media followers is critical. Measuring the growth in brand reach is a common way to accomplish this. It is likewise important you understand how all of your actions may affect the reach of your brand. A table or line graph are common tools to help you measure this.

Your actions have an impact on the resulting count of your Twitter followers.

Your latest product release and asking people for product feedback probably increased your Twitter follower count after sharing content about the product. Ideally, the type of content you publish and the subject matter resonated with visitors enough to push them past their inertia point so they will click the Twitter follow button.

It is not just how you say it and what you say on Twitter and Facebook that assists growing your following. The key is to analyze your overall social media actions and then tie them to the goal you are intending to achieve.

One example is, both your email and website contain valuable content; by including social sharing toolbars to both of them, it can increase the number of touch points available for visiting followers and fans.

Step Three – Generate Sales

How do you transform your visitors and contacts into revenue once you have an audience built from your hard work? The usual marketer desires to drive quantifiable results so their time investment is justified, but they remain difficult to measure entirely.

There are some things you can do to measure if your efforts are delivering results.

• Surveys – Survey your customers is one way to measure if your social media efforts had any impact on them. Ask which of your efforts added to their purchasing process.

• Social Media-Specific Offers – A second idea is to create a special offer or specific landing pages to promote via just your social media marketing. Using these pages you can track actions and traffic as these pages are specifically aimed to your social media efforts.

• Google Analytics – One can create social media-specific campaigns and tag those links and campaigns if you use Google Analytics, which is a free download for you. This can analyze how many visitors came from a social media source to visit a particular landing page.

• Different Links – To determine your traffic sources more accurately, employ different links in your social media for tracking information. As an example, use a different link for your Facebook post than the one you use for a Twitter tweet to determine which media source your traffic came from.

Other solutions can include engaging browser cookies to track the source from where a purchaser clicked a link and from which social media posting. If you want other methods to track your results you can research more solutions in a Google search.

Step Four – Gain Community Participants

If you’ve done all the above steps adequately, you should see your social media presence growing each week. Some revenues may be showing up now from your actions. How does one boost it up to the next level then?

In the world of social media, there is a neat trick called viral marketing which is having your friends, followers and contacts pass information or tweets about you and your products along to their friends’ social pages. This acts to distribute notice of your brand for you.

Conclusion

Your goals in social media marketing are tied to the purchasing process, which involves acquiring contacts first, then promoting your brand, eventually creating sales, and gaining brand followers. Whichever goal you have, to evaluate your social marketing efforts’ ROI, it’s important to use a goal-based approach. One will not know whether their social media campaign is working for them until they completely understand their final objective.