6 steps to take in developing your Share to Social strategy within emails

I posted an article yesterday with a great infograph that points to the positive impact that a Share to Social program in your emails can have on the overall click throughs.  You can read all about it here.

I got a lot of follow up requests asking me for a strategy or approach on implementing a Share to Social program.  So, here are six steps to take to develop your social sharing functionality and measure reader interaction:

Step 1:Identify the most relevant social networks.  Don’t clutter your email with too many social sharing options.  According to several studies, the top three social networks among newsletter subscribers were LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.  But you know your audience best.  Provide options to the ones you know they use the most.

Step 2: Point shared links to article summary pages.  Provide share buttons per each article, not just one share button for the entire newsletter to then be put on the subscriber’s network.  This allows subscribers to choose which articles they want to share.  Also you should make the share button upload to a link to the article summary page instead of the original source so you can generate traffic to your own website and introduce non-subscribers to the value already provided to their audience.

Step 3: Use focus group to test new newsletter templates.  Create multiple template mock ups incorporating the share buttons and ask for feedback as to whether the panel recognized the icons and if they had interacted with similar buttons in the past.

Step 4: Stagger social sharing launch across newsletter titles.   If you offer several newsletters, get your formula right on the first newsletter by testing and then roll out to others.  Gradually add more and more titles with the social sharing functionality, each time sending a note to those subscribers highlighting the new feature and providing instructions on how to use the new buttons.

Step 5: Track shared article metrics.   Once the buttons are active on newsletter, monitor how subscribers use the new sharing feature.  Are they never sharing to Linkedin?  Should you remove it then?

Step 6: Use sharing data to provide additional content.  Social media sharing became another source of content for newsletter subscribers.  The clicks on the social media share buttons became an element that factored in to a “Most Clicked” story.   Sharing content through social media is a great way to get your content to your audience.

Try  utilizing these steps to help you build your own email strategy with social sharing.

Have you implemented a share to social program in your emails?  Did you see significant lift?

Here is a great example of content that people would want to share and likely drove a nice amount of additional traffic to Macys

Increase clicks in email campaigns with Social Sharing buttons

You have heard it before and you will continue to hear this, email and social go together – they are not exclusive of one another.  They were meant to be together, like Peanut Butter and Jelly!

One of the easiest ways to increase click-through rates in your email campaigns is to include share to social options.  This should not be used on a welcome message, receipt, or change of address campaigns, but rather on your campaigns that have original content (stories/articles) or a call to action (get 10% off today!).  Let your users be your biggest advocate and help spread your content – just make it easy for them to do so!  Including a share to social option is easy, just ask your current ESP and they should have a built-in solution that will also let you track responses and then re-target (targeting your influencers and rewarding them).  Or you can always use ShareThis in case your ESP does not offer it.

GreatResponse put out a infograph that shows just how impactful adding these simple sharing buttons can be:

via MarketingLand

As always – I am happy to be a resource for you.  Just reach out.

Have you hired a Data Scientist yet?

Great article on Mashable.  Marketing budgets getting the squeeze over the last several years has led to a demand for deeper analytics across all marketing efforts.  Now that all the data is available, these teams are having trouble making sense of all of it.  Enter the Data Scientist.

“Data is the new oil,” says Andreas Weigend, Head of the Social Data Lab at Stanford and the former Chief Scientist at Amazon, in a statement. “Unfortunately, the technology has evolved faster than the workforce skills to make sense of it, and organizations across sectors must adapt to this new reality or perish.”  Check out the great infograph by EMC.

 

My oh my – search is in for a change!

Great article by Douglas Crets about the transformation of Search with the influence of social media.  Read the whole article via FastCompany.  Do you know how to access your top advocates that you don’t even know exist?

The new motto at search engines–and maybe even inside corporate offices at brands–may be: “How do we find who we don’t know we want to know? How do we get them to tell us what we don’t know?”