Flowtown is Our Favorite New Toy!
Earlier this year, 6S Marketing began using MailChimp as our primary Email Software. MailChimp integrates with tons of apps and social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google Apps, Salesforce and Eventbrite.
The latest app to integrate with MailChimp is Flowtown. Flowtown, simply put “Turns an Email Address into a Social Profile”. 
Essentially, you run your email subscriber list through Flowtown and are given full names (if you don’t already have that), the subscribers age, gender, occupation, location and all the social networks that person is on.
A lot like big brother, and I have to admit, I felt really snoopy finding all of this information out about our subscribers after running our list through Flowtown, BUT, I quickly got over that when i found out that 33% of our list is on Facebook, 28% on Twitter, 18% on MySpace (what?!) and 42% are on LinkedIn. I also found out that the majority of our subscribers are in their 30′s, with about 30% of our list being women, and 70% being men. The real surprise for me, and most people in the office, was how high of a percentage of people are still on MySpace!
Diving deeper into the data, I was able to identify the top influencers on Twitter within our list based on their Klout score.
To determine if this demographic information would result in higher engagement from an email campaign, I tested it out by creating an email campaign geared towards our subscribers who are on Twitter.
Last week, a few of the 6S Marketing peeps headed down to Austin, Texas for SXSW. I wanted to let our subscribers on Twitter know so they could follow everyone live at SXSW on Twitter, not just from 6S, but all who attended from Vancouver. Here are the results:
By targeting specific users with relevant content to one of the social networks we knew our readers were on, we obtained our highest ever open rate (67.1%) and click rate (31.5%). Both of which, were well over the industry averages (17.9% and 4.1% respectively).
With every email campaign we do, we try to make the content as relevant and useful to our users as possible. In the past, this was usually done by looking at email domains to figure out where our subscribers work as well as tracking which content links each user clicked by using AIM reports (thank you MailChimp!), in order to determine which content interested our readers the most.
Additional data could have been obtained by asking for it during the initial email sign up form process. The problem with using email list sign up forms to gather additional subscriber information is that a subscriber won’t always be willing to fill out those specialty form fields, usually only opting to submit an email address and name.
However, with Flowtown, that specialty data is gathered for you. It’s seriously as easy as taking candy from a baby (which I would never do!). And from the data, you can create customized content and campaigns geared towards subscriber’s interests, age, sex, and social network profiles, obtaining the best engagement results from an email campaign – ever!
RT @kel_roberts: Flowtown is Our Favorite New Toy! – http://www.6smarketing.com/flowtown-is-our-favorite-new-toy/
totally. @flowtown customers get 3x+ higher opens/click rates vs. industry averages. quick example -> http://bit.ly/bRB7ab #mediachat
wow. i love the testimonial from @6s_marketing http://bit.ly/bRB7ab and i like @kel_roberts brief description of flowtown… #mediachat
RT @ebloch: totally. @flowtown customers get 3x+ higher opens/click rates vs. industry averages. quick example -> http://bit.ly/bRB7ab #mediachat
Flowtown is Our Favorite New Toy! – http://www.6smarketing.com/flowtown-is-our-favorite-new-toy/