by Patrick Zuluaga, PMZ Marketing [Download Article]
You can leverage the opportunity to reach out further with your email marketing if you include ‘share’ links to social networks. The average number of people in a social network varies depending on the age group and ranges from about 50 to 500 with the younger set at the higher end. The potential to utilise this social phenomena is powerful when your email message is relevant, useful and interesting to your target email list.
Most of you will be very familiar with ‘send to a friend’ or ‘forward to a friend’ links as standard in your email message templates. The concept is similar however the mathematics is like comparing addition to multiplication. With ‘send to a friend’ or ‘forward to a friend’ links the recipient will enter an email address or two of their friends or business colleagues. If there is an incentive or contest involved they may send to the minimum number required to qualify for the incentive or reward. With social networking the ‘share’ link is to their social network/s. In less steps and keystrokes they can be massively productive for you in expanding the reach for your marketing message!
Keep in mind that your marketing message must be relevant, useful and interesting for recipients to want to share your email. Your email message must include a ‘call to action’ for the expanded recipients in the shared social networks to become a subscriber and/or customer. I see many promotional emails and eNewsletters without a ‘subscribe’ link and sometimes I get a funny look when I suggest to clients to include this link. Why put this link when they are already subscribers? Well, how will your new recipients join your mailing list without the link?
When you first introduce your new facility to share the email message for your recipients’ social network you will need inform them of its use. Give them a short brief on how the sharing process will work and give them the reasons why they may want to share your message with their own social network. Make sure your email template and design will accommodate the shared link placement to optimise sharing. You may even consider a incentive program to encourage the desired behaviour of sharing and reward those who share your email messages most frequently.
Apply these guidelines and you will get Better Marketing Results from your email marketing efforts.