With 55 million updates on Twitter every day and several million more on Facebook, it’s no wonder marketers are excited about social media.
Whilst making a message that goes ‘viral’ is more pot luck than a defined strategy, you can certainly improve your message’s chances of being shared by including links to social media sites.
You’d have thought adding links to Facebook and Twitter in B2C marketing emails was a no brainer these days. It doesn’t cost anything to do, and it offers pure, sweet ROI.
But according to dotMailer’s annual ‘Hitting the Mark’ study of 36 leading UK retailers:
- Only 17% included a ‘share on social network’ link
- Half didn’t have a ‘Forward to a friend’ link
- Only 4 linked to their blog
- Only 3 out of 36 had a personalised salutation, which should be a crime
- And it gets worse…
Adding sharing links can increase click throughs 55%
According to another recent study (by GetResponse) adding a sharing option to your emails can increase click throughs by 30%. And if you go the extra yard and add another 2 sharing links you can ramp up click throughs as high as 55%. Not too shabby.
If these findings are concrete, UK retailers could be missing out on millions in sales, simply because they haven’t made their emails to share.
So don’t you make the same mistake. When writing B2C (and perhaps even some B2B) marketing emails include links to Facebook, Twitter and any other social media site your customers might use to increase click throughs and drive up responses.