Responsys, Bazaarvoice collaboration offers customized content

I recently had the chance to chat with Shawn Myers about the integration and what it means for retail brands.

Kristina: The integration of social with email is getting a lot of play. What is it about these two forms of advertising that mesh so well?

Shawn Myers, Responsys Director of Product Marketing: Email still provides major brands a powerful mechanism to deliver highly targeted and personalized content to their consumers. Today, many consumers engage in social conversations by sharing their ideas, questions, and comments about products and services on brands' web sites or their social media channels, especially Facebook. By integrating social and email, brands are now able to leverage consumers' social behavior to create more relevant and personalized email marketing messages.
The integration between the Responsys Interact Suite and the Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Platform allows brand marketers to easily and effectively reach consumers in real-time with personalized email messages based on their specific comments, questions, and ratings about various products and services. Furthermore, marketers can easily assess the consumer engagements with those emails for follow-up re-targeting via personalized email, mobile, social or display advertising messages orchestrated through the Responsys Interact Suite.

Kristina: Relevance seems to be the word of the year for marketers. How can brands improve the relevance of their content to improve engagement?

Shawn: Brands can improve the relevance of their content by better understanding consumers' profiles and behaviors across various online and offline channels. For example, if a consumer has been asking questions about interest rates and re-financing, then email marketing messages or display ads personalized with the best deals from local banks for refinancing will most likely improve consumer engagement. Similarly, if a consumer has been writing positive comments about a specific product or service, a personalized social media message with a promotional offer for that product to the followers of that person may encourage those followers to also consider that product or service.

Kristina: Once launched, how can brands use the collaboration to track/improve campaign ROI?

Shawn: Brands can track and improve the email open and click rates on the links within the personalized emails that are sent by Responsys based on consumer's social commerce actions captured by Bazaarvoice. Furthermore, brands can also track conversions, such as product purchases online or offline, after sending highly targeted and personalized marketing messages based on the consumer's social commerce behavior, e.g., product reviews, ratings, questions, and sentiment.

Tags: Bazaarvoice, email marketing, email social integration, Responsys, social marketing, social sharing