Epsilon is now flavoring its email marketing with insights from social media, thanks to a new partnership with social experience provider Lithium/Klout, announced today.
Under the arrangement, marketing tech provider Epsilon will feed Klout the Twitter handles of customers on its clients’ email lists, so their social posts can be matched up to the email addresses. Both companies said this partnership represents an innovative use of social media intelligence to guide email marketing. Klout, a division of Lithium, ranks Web users' online social influence.
A toy company, for instance, might have around 100,000 customers on its list, and Epsilon can provide handles for, say, 60,000 of them.
As an email marketing provider, Epsilon doesn’t have Twitter handles for its client mailing lists. It employs the services of another company, Full Contact, which connects email addresses to Twitter handles by using publicly available info.
As Lithium/Klout director of platform Tyler Singletary pointed out to me, Epsilon doesn’t need an accurate match for every email address -- only enough to provide a large enough sample of that mailing list.
The handles will then be used by Klout to track those customers’ social expressions on a given topic, drawing from Klout’s 700 million social media profiles, as well as the 100 million unique monthly users in Lithium's online communities. Klout/Lithium will also scan social media feeds from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
The key question to be answered, according to Singletary: “Are their [email marketing plans] matching up with the trends?”
The results will allow Epsilon’s clients to gain some sense of how that particular list of customers feels about a topic, so as to help a client better target email marketing.
The toy company might get a better sense of whether an upcoming Star Wars movie is attracting a lot of chatter among customers on its list. It might also indicate whether a lot of the customers with Twitter handles have profiles indicating they’re Star Wars fans, or if they have children. This info could help Epsilon focus an email campaign for new Star Wars-related toys.
At the moment, Epsilon senior vice president Quinn Jalli told me, the social data will be used in the aggregate to inform strategy. But, he acknowledged, it might be used at some point to target specific emails to specific users, since the social info is being tracked via email-matching Twitter handles.
This partnership opens new territory for both parties. Epsilon will now be able to identify social topics that interest specific clients on its mailing lists. This is also the first time Lithium has worked with an email marketer like Epsilon.
Even when Lithium is integrated with marketing platforms, Singletary told me, “we typically only provide data for social media and CRM [customer relationship management] tools.”