June 2009
Astral Brands, the parent company of cosmetics giants Pur Minerals and Aloette Cosmetics, is pairing the power of email and social media to raise awareness and boost sales of its expanding cosmetics lines.
With an email marketing effort that typically returns a 30 per cent lift in same day sales, the company’s new social strategy uses its ExactTarget-powered email marketing messages to recruit new Facebook fans, providing the company a loyal group of brand advocates.
“Our expanded marketing effort provides both our customers and our independent consultants with new and different ways to interact with our brands,” said Nalini Humphrey, online marketing manager at Astral Brands.
“Email provides a solid foundation for us to drive traffic to our social media campaigns.”
The company’s most recent Facebook campaign added more than 3,000 fans in the month of May. Using links in its email marketing messages and on its Website, the company invited its network of franchises, consultants and customers to become fans as part of the company’s 31st anniversary celebration.
“Our expanding Facebook community provides us an engaged customer group that understands our products and wants to learn about the future of our brands and our ever-growing product line,” Humphrey said.
Astral is the latest ExactTarget client to bridge the gap between social media and email. Joint research from Ball State University, the Email Marketer’s Club and ExactTarget released in May found that enabling social sharing in email marketing messages is expected to increase nearly 350 percent in 2009 with 46 percent of all email marketers planning to use social media and email in tandem.
“The rapid adoption of social media has prompted many marketers to search for ways to harness the collective power of social media and email,” said Tim Kopp, ExactTarget’s chief marketing officer.
“Astral Brands’ integration of social media with its existing email marketing efforts is an innovative approach that is driving increased brand awareness among its business partners and its customers.”
The news of Astral Brands successful email and social media strategy comes less than two months after ExactTarget launched Social Forward, its flexible metrics-driven social sharing solution for email. The functionality gives email marketers the industry’s first social media integration that allows multiple ways to leverage sharing both through a Direct to Social offering and a partnership with social media syndication powerhouse ShareThis.
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