Klout and eMail Marketing: Who’s Sending Your eMails?

Today, I received an email from a leading high performance sales training and systems company that offers leading solutions for buyer-focused sales and marketing. The company has been around for a while and is clearly a leader in their space, so they had credibility from the start. The email headline got my attention as it was related to new buyer-focused sales strategies and it included a call-to-action for  training in advanced marketing and sales.

Unfortunately, the sender of this email was a Client Executive from this company who has not, as yet, built significant online or social media credibility. A quick check using Rapportive revealed a Klout score under 15, a Twitter presence with less than 50 followers and less than 20 updates. LinkedIn indicated a more mature profile which did elevate the credibility of the sender.

Clearly Klout is not a fully accepted medium for assessing social influence and topical relevance, but the general trend is clear that social media transparency,  connections and content are increasingly important factors in search results and in general credibility online – and the lenses we use include tools like Rapportive.

So what should you do as a marketer?

Make sure your email sender is credible around the subject matter.

As a reference, the image to the left is a snapshot of my Rapportive profile from this morning. I have work to do, but I maintain a social media presence and try to bring value to clients around revenue marketing every day. Check  your  profile and see what you think (see this post from 2011). Some of the things to work on are simple:

• Install Rapportive if you are using Gmail or Google Apps or check out your profile on someone else’s Rapportive app
• Search for yourself so you open up visibility into your online presence
• Is there and appropriate image in your profile?
• Do you have a reasonable flow of content and updates?
• Is your business email address tied to your social profiles?
• Have you built a network of following and followers that can add reach and velocity to your publishing?
• Have you build a basic level of “Klout”?

It is not always easy to build a presence – particularly in regulated industries –  but given the transparency of a user’s online social profile today and with cloud and social apps now at our finger tips, it is too easy for your audience to quickly (and perhaps unfairly) assess the credibility of your content and messaging against your social influence and general profile.  For your eMail marketing programs, make sure you check your sender’s Klout and social profile “at a glance” to validate the credibility of the sender and make sure that the credibility aligns with the topic of the message. Perhaps the message should come from your team member with the greatest level of current social media presence and “Klout” around the subject.