Flowtown – Where Social Meets Email Marketing

I recently co-authored a book on Local Search called Get Found Now Local Search Secrets Exposed and became fascinated with how local search was adding social elements. With the advent of user reviews directly on the local search site as well as aggregating reviews from other sites like Yelp and Judy’s book. Social has now become a critical element of optimizing your business for Local SEO. Suffice it to say I am looking at all things related to Geo-data as they relate to local search optimization.

Recently I discovered a really interesting tool from Flowtown that examines business communication channels with their consumer audience and then translates that information to identify not on their email address but their name, age group, gender, occupation, location, influence, and every social network they belong to (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN, Amazon, Flickr, Stumbleupon, and Myspace) and participate in personally or professionally. Essentially, they have harnessed social networking and turned it into social email. The endless possibilities of social media marketing make it possible for a business to make just about anything happen on line when it comes to identifying consumers and their personal preferences in the market place converting them into social marketing dollars.

Flowtown is an incredibly innovative tool that allows B2B’s and B2C’s to target email campaigns via Mail Chimp to clients with the firm knowledge of their social behaviors and influences as well as their IP address (which reveals their current geolocation). This knowledge gives a business a ton of specific information for crafting a more targeted highly focused campaign based on demographic and social information of users that provide enhanced social email marketing.

With Flowtown’s use of Klout’s influence calculator, a user will know exactly who you as a business need to reach out and touch to get noticed and get people talking about your brand and your products/services. You can target particular customers by geographics, by which social networking site they hang out on, and by the level of influence they have on others where ever it is they hang out.

To test Flowtown the first 50 or so imports cost nothing as do the first 250 emails per month. To maximize your contacts is quite reasonable ($14.99 for unlimited contacts and up to 10,000 emails/month). With a minimal investment now you have not only a useful email marketing channel but an influence tracking device for everyone in your network. You can analyze their social profile, find out who chats with whom where as well as their other favorite social network channels. Real customer intelligence is now at your fingertips for a song!

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