ClickThroughs #2 trend is that email and social will get more integrated.
“As email open rates continue to decline some marketers are left watching this powerful resource diminish, wondering how they can reignite this audience.”
Email firms like Constant Contact have certainly seen this trend and are jumping on it hard. They have added many social components to their email service.
Here’s some of the research that shows that integrating email with social sharing drives results:
- Emails that provide users with sharing options on social media sites actually drive a significant increase in click-through rates – 30% higher than without social sharing options ( Source: GetResponse )
- Marketers rate social media as the online marketing channel with the greatest positive effect when integrated with email. source: Lyris
- Facebook and Twitter were the most commonly used sites in integrated email-social campaigns
- Facebook integration produced the best results eMarketer
- 21% of email marketers say social media integration is essential to drive opt-in rates when you are building a list
What you can do to socialize your email content:
- Use a tool like Flowtown that uncovers the social graph of the people on your email list
- Add share this buttons on every email
- Connect to the social network/s that most of your list members belong to
- Monitor the social conversation and engage
- Identify and reward your influencers and evangelists
- Test and track everything. Use analytics to measure the effectiveness of your emails and your social engagement
Like the press release, email is not dead. social media does not kill these channels, it just becomes an amplifier for the message.