Silverpop has been on the vanguard of old-school digital marketing providers — that is, email marketing firms — embracing social media. The company has released a slew of products designed to integrate the two disciplines, as well as incorporate mobile and local technologies along the way.
Given that history, it is difficult to imagine a subsector or market constituency that it missed in its earlier product rollouts, but apparently Silverpop has found one, and it has set out to rectify the omission. The neglected potential customer is the novice or shoestring marketer that does not have any money to spend on a social media campaign apparatus.
Social Media for Small Business Beginners
To target these users, Silverpop is making certain assumptions. One is that that the user has some kind of presence or is active in some manner on Facebook. Silverpop is also assuming the user wants to parlay that presence into some sort of lead generation or customer outreach activity.
Enter Social Pull, a free Facebook application that gives Facebook users a tool to generate social forms and landing pages that are able to capture customer data.
“This is not very different from what users can do with our other products, but it is free and it lets marketers start to see the benefits of building one-to-one relationships from Facebook right away,” Adam Steinberg, Silverpop’s segment marketing director for social media, told CRM Buyer.
Driving Likes
These benefits can be surprisingly robust, especially when coming from what is basic social media functionality.
The application lets companies gather email sign-ups, leads and RSVPs for events from their Facebook “likes” via its form builders.
The social forms, which have up to 10 fields, prompt users to collect contact information from their fans directly within Facebook. The information gathered is then saved in the reporting section.
Another feature of Social Pull is that users can put these forms — and the related content that they are visiting — into a so-called “like-gate.” That way, the user would have to “like” the page and fill out the form before being able to access the content — say a coupon or a recipe.
Social Pull is also customizable so it can fit in with the company’s Facebook page.
The Next Step
Once the company has this contact information, it can be used in any of a number of additional marketing campaigns, Steinberg said.
“They might want to run email marketing campaigns or otherwise distribute content to these customers,” he suggested. “The point is, the marketer has contact information from a user base it didn’t necessarily have before, and it also has the ability to deepen those relationships with additional promotions or campaigns.”
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