Social Media and E-mail Marketing Campaigns: Symmetry versus Convergence

Abstract

Companies use social business intelligence (SBI) to identify and collect strategically significant information from a wide range of publicly available data sources, such as social media (SM). This study is an SBI-driven analysis of a company operating in the insurance sector. It underlines the contribution of SBI technology to sustainable profitability of a company by using an optimized marketing campaign on Facebook, in symmetry with a traditional e-mail campaign. Starting from a campaign on SM, the study identified a client portfolio, processed data, and applied a set of statistical methods, such as the index and the statistical significance (T-test), which later enabled the authors to validate research hypotheses (RH), and led to relevant business decisions. The study outlines the preferences of the selected group of companies for the manner in which they run a marketing campaign on SM in symmetry with an e-mail-run campaign. Although the study focused on the practical field of insurance, the suggested model can be used by any company of any industry proving that BI technologies is the nexus of collecting and interpreting results that are essential, globally applicable, and lead to sustainable development of companies operating in the age of globalization. The results of the study prove that symmetrical unfolding (time and opportunity symmetry) of SM marketing campaigns, and using email, could lead to better results compared to two separate marketing campaigns. Moreover, the outcomes of both campaigns showed convergence on SBI platforms, which led to higher efficiency of management of preferences of campaign beneficiaries in the insurance sector.