L-Soft's Lars Nordstrom Speaks at International eMetrics Summit

By L-Soft Staff

L-Soft's Lars Nordstrom gave a presentation on strategic messaging and different online marketing channels at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit. Lars has been involved in building online communities since the early 1980s and is a frequent speaker on the Internet marketing and web analytics conference circuit. Here, Lars shares highlights from his remarks to international summit participants who gathered in Stockholm, Sweden, in September.

During the eMetrics conference, Lars discussed how to best focus marketing and communication spending in a strategic manner to increase customer satisfaction, improve results and keep overall costs under control. His presentation featured an exploration of marketing channels – including opt-in email list communication – and a re-thinking of social media strategies, with the goal of guiding organizations in creating concrete action plans.

Lars challenged participants to consider the following key questions:

• Which channels are actually appropriate for your organization?
• Who should be speaking for your organization, and with what voice – an internal organizational voice or an independent voice?
• What are the levels of escalation available for crisis management? And who solves problems that arise?

Lars emphasized that social media is about actively engaging and gave tips and insights for organizations on strategic communication, ensuring relevance and using metrics and analytics to set and achieve goals. Following are some of his key points and the content related to each:

"If you don't have the resources to manage active engagement, then don't push into social media any more than you have to. Actively monitoring your organization's online reputation, however, is a basic minimum requirement."

• Set up alerts to report articles mentioning your organization on the web. If negative coverage arises, discuss any problems that are revealed internally, solve the issue and respond with the solution – openly, and in a polite and helpful way.
• Respect that you can't please all of the people all of the time. Sometimes it's fine to agree to disagree and then move on. Nobody wins a flame-war.
• Consider bringing social media to your existing website by building a community with your site as the hub. LISTSERV®, for example, is an excellent tool for organizations wishing to build focused email list communities. Having the community on your site makes engagement and management far easier than with social media channels and is instantly and intrinsically measurable.
• Create value for your customers via your online community or email discussion list. Retain and grow your community by frequently asking yourself, "What's in it for them?"
• Discuss within your organization the overall effect of having your website visitors click away from your site in order to follow your organization on Facebook, Twitter or other social media sites. Ask yourself what these sites offer your fans that your own website does not.
• Consider that you may choose to use social media sites to draw fans to your own website and email community, thereby engaging with your target audience on your own turf, within your new or existing community.

"Email is always a dialogue – or it should be. No matter what type of content you are sending, the messages must be clear and relevant to the recipients."

• Ask for feedback and expect it.
• Use surveys where appropriate.
• Ensure that there is value for respondents, a clear answer when they ask "What's in it for me?"

"Web analytics adaptation – measurement and analysis of your website – is a key component of understanding what works best for your organization and how different communication channels impact the traffic on your site, as well as your eventual goal conversions."

• Testing is extremely important to tune your message to the intended audience. Use A/B-split testing in email messages and optimize the landing page. Advanced tools such as LISTSERV Maestro make analytical integration intuitive and achievable, even for novice users.
• Set web conversion goals and analyze the results, using your findings to remove obstacles that prevent site visitors from completing their transactions.

The eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit is attended by marketing managers, web analysts and business intelligence experts seeking strategies to increase their knowledge of the ever-evolving Internet industry. For more information, visit: http://www.emetrics.org

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