Thought I’d share something I read by Adam Ostrow on Mashable.com. It’s a good insight into the opportunities of Social Media.
You’ve most likely had an e-mail newsletter for your company for much longer than you’ve had a presence on social media sites. But now that you do both, the two can go hand-in-hand, with e-mail creating an opportunity to extend your presence on social media sites, and social media sites providing a way to get more e-mail subscribers. At the moment though, most marketers aren’t connecting the dots. According to a recent study published by eMarketer, 48% of marketers include “forward to a friend” features in their e-mails, but only 13% include features that make it easy to share content on social networks. Here’s a look at how to close the gap, and why it’s so important that you do.
Why Include Social Media in Your E-mail? Just like a piece of Web content can “go viral” as people share it across social networks, your e-mail promotions can get a big boost by making it easy to share them. A recent study by Marketing Sherpa concluded that simply including sharing buttons to an e-mail marketing campaign led to a “25% boost in reader interaction, and a surge in inbound traffic from social networking sites.” Moreover, huge gains were reported in traffic via social sites: 2,070% from LinkedIn, 1,680% from Twitter, and 1,351% from Facebook.
How do you do it? Share buttons have become common on Web content, but they’re also easy to integrate into e-mails. If your e-mail consists of multiple articles, make sure each points to a page on the Web, and that your Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn share buttons are setup to share the URL of each respective article (note: you’ll want to stick to images and text links for your e-mail share buttons as opposed to JavaScript). Beyond sharing articles though, make sure all of your e-mails include prominent links to your presence on various social sites. Calls to action in a sidebar or in the header like “Follow Us on Twitter” or “Become a Fan on Facebook” will help people connect with you on social sites and help build your audience on them.
