Return On Subscriber – Email Marketing Blog

Unless you have been living in a cave with Bin Laden, you probably heard about Twitter in 2008. If you are still unsure on Twitter, there are great tutorials here and here. The buzz for Twitter is deserved, as it is becoming it’s own communication channel, mixing IM, SMS, Email, & Web into an addictive web 2.0 stew.

Last month I tried an experiment with Twitter that turned out some pretty interesting results, so I thought I would share them with you. I set up Twitter as an email marketing subscriber, posted an email campaign through a Tweet, and was able to track the results. Here’s how I did it, and you can too. All you need is a Email Marketing tool that provides individualized tracking.

1. Create a twitter@yourdomain.com Email Address

Create an alias email address for Twitter and have the new email address forwarded to your email address. This will be the “subscriber” in your email program that will be used on Twitter and tracked.

2. Send your Email Campaign to the twitter@yourdomain.com

You can add either add the new address to your list, or send a one-off to it. Make sure the email campaign includes a “View in Your Browser” or “Can’t See Images, Click Here” link to a web version of the campaign.

3. When you receive the Email Campaign sent to twitter@yourdomain.com, copy the browser version URL, and shorten it (you can use http://idek.net or http://is.gd for URL shortening)

Click the “View in Your Browser” link in the email, and copy the encrypted link in the address bar of the browser. This link will be encrypted to track activity for the email address it was sent to, that being twitter@yourdomain.com. You will need to shorten this url, as it will be long and messy. The 2 services I prefer are http://idek.net and http://is.gd, both of which have browser plugins.

4. From your Twitter account (personal or company), send a Tweet out with the shortened url link to your newsletter.

An example of this might be: “Company Name January Newsletter: Tips, Tutorials, and Resources http://is.gd/n4d”. Twitter works very similar to subject lines, make sure you clearly describe the content or value early in the Tweet. (Remember, you have 140 characters in Twitter, so you can be a little more descriptive than an email subject line.)

5. Track results in your Email Marketing Software

In your Email Marketing software, you should be able to login to the campaign or contact manager, locate twitter@yourdomain.com and view the reads, clicks, and hopefully conversions that came from your Twitter followers. If you’re luck, you might gain traction from Twitter Search or Re-Tweets as well.

While these results won’t tell you which Twitter users (Tweeps, as they are called by the Twitter community) clicked on your link, it will give you data that you can work with. If the email does get a lot of views and clicks, it might be time to invest more resources into Twitter in 2009.

If you do give this a try, I would love to know the results, drop them in a comment