Website Conversion Blog
The news that Ben & Jerry’s ice cream will stop sending email to their 1.3M customers is, frankly, remarkable.
What were they thinking? Are they nuts?
Their plan, announced in an email to their subscribers last week, said that they will be discontinuing email—in favor of social media. While there has been some idle speculation about whether social media will replace email, this is frankly nonsense. They are complementary channels, and understanding how to use the two together in a mutually supportive way is the key.
There are three fundamental problems with Ben and Jerry’s decision:
1. Customers choose the channels, not brands
Ben and Jerry’s subscribers opted in to their email program. They chose email as their preferred method of communication to receive news and promotions about the brand. We know from multiple studies that the number one reason for ‘friending a brand’ is to receive special deals and promotions. The same holds true for email.
ExactTarget recently published some interesting new research titled Subscribers, Fans and Followers on how consumers choose to interact with brands. When looking for promotions:
“76% of consumers will initially seek deals and promotions on a brand’s website, and from there, 62% will sign up to receive email, while 54% will use a search engine. 17% of consumers will also include Facebook as part of their quest for ongoing deals, and 3% will search for deals on Twitter.”
Cutting off their fans from their chosen communication channel is only part of the story: customers expect to be able to subscribe to email communications.
2. Social media isn’t a replacement for email
Ben and Jerry’s may have more than 1.3 million Facebook fans, but it doesn’t mean that there’s no role for email in their marketing mix.
Email is direct and proactive, and when used well, can be personal and directly relevant. The way many brands use social media is as an impersonal broadcast that relies on fans visiting their Facebook pages. Email reaches out and can reactivate fans’ interest in a brand in a way that a social network can’t. Of course, social networks also engage fans in a way that email can’t. The two are highly complementary, and neither is a replacement for the other.
3. Just because it’s hard to measure doesn’t mean it doesn’t work
Unlike ecommerce sites, where email is the number one tool of choice for driving high quality traffic to an ecommerce website, Ben and Jerry’s don’t sell on line—the ice cream would melt. So while the quality of traffic you drive to your website may be directly correlated to your conversion rate on an ecommerce website, a conversion for Ben and Jerry’s is an in-store purchase. While you can certainly measure the use of promotion codes and vouchers in-store, it’s hard to gauge the footfall impact from an email campaign.
While Ben and Jerry’s may have financial motivation for dropping their email newsletter, perhaps they should have been focusing on how to make their newsletter altogether more relevant and tightly integrated with the social media programs, rather than killing it altogether. In time, it is likely that this decision will be reversed—email is too important a channel to ignore.
Tags: ben and jerry's, ecommerce, exacttarget, Fans and Followers, Subscribers, website conversion
[...] Ben and Jerry’s Abandon Email, and their Fans by Charles Nicholls [...]
Since I posted this blog, Ben and Jerry’s have released a statement clarifying their use of email in the future. Interestingly they sent in by email , rather than posting on a social media site.
“In general, I think it’s a bit of a misunderstanding. The announcement came from our UK team, who was basically sharing that they planned to reach out to their fans via social media moving forward. I think they wanted to alleviate any fears from fans who previously received a newsletter style email to think that they had somehow fallen off the list. I believe they’re still keeping email as a venue for special events/opportunities as they mentioned they might still reach out via email.
Again, this was a note from our UK team. I believe the rest of the Ben & Jerry’s folks around the globe (including us here at the HQ in Vermont who support the U.S. and the globe) are planning to continue to use: email, social media, text messaging, augmented reality, snail mail, vanilla guerrilla marketing, grassroots Social Mission endeavors, sky writers, deep-sea divers and of course… scoop trucks on the road.”
- Sean Greenwood, Ben & Jerry’s
So what Sean’s saying is that it’s OK because this is only a UK issue. The Brits are still pulling their newsletter, but that’s not a problem because it doesn’t affect the US.
You can read more on this here:
http://www.theemailguide.com/email-marketing/scoop-ben-jerry%E2%80%99s-responds-to-claims-that-they-will-drop-email-marketing/
So, maybe it was all just a big misunderstanding by those pesky Brits in their UK office. Or a storm in an ice cream pot maybe?
Social media will never replace email. It was over a year ago that I had read that someone was spouting that it would. A business cannot resolve problems with sound bites, and it is near impossible to see a response or even locate it within Twitter or Facebook.
Customers want to see and read real communication. I can always read an email later, but no one can sit and wait for a sound bite. Then if you are following numerous people or businesses you may never see the Tweet, etc.
Gotta disagree with point 3 about the difficulty of measuring email ROI for CPG. Pretty straightforward even without coupling. Household panel overlay (Nielsen, IRI) of email subscribers versus control group of non subscribers can give you the lift in actual purchases attributable to an email or crm program. We’ve done this for clients many a time… Surveys with claimed purchases always a possibility as well.
Twitter: @ritawheat
Well, forgetting the statistics, panels and assumptions … I actually prefer to see communication on my facebook/Hyves account rather than receive tons of email that I generally delete. Maybe it is to do with how it is presented in the social media space, or perhaps some of us are tired of getting junk mail. Oh yes, for the demographics, I am a Brit living in the Netherlands.
And one last thing… I don’t get any emails from Apple… but I sure check out there websites and keynotes…. I guess that is a brand that knows how to address its customer base and create a massive following. Maybe good if a few other companies started learning from Apple how they create a fantastic brand, a huge tribe and customers that just want to buy there stuff.
My 2 cents.