A powerful way to generate an online viral marketing effect – hopefully with increased exposure, traffic, conversions and sales as a result – is to encourage email readers to share your email content with others on social networks.

To see how email marketers are currently encouraging ’shares’ on social networks, consider the seven (7) key findings of Silverpop’s ‘Emails Gone Viral: Measuring Share to Social Performance’ benchmark study.

Silverpop’s findings are based on a study of 562 email messages containing links to social networking sites sent by 98 business-to-consumer companies and 16 business-to-business firms to more than 54 million recipients.

Silverpop’s 7 key findings:

1. Most email messages intended for sharing include 4 to 5 ’social sharing links’.

2. The ‘life’ of a shared message is about one week. Email messages tend to get clicks on sharing links for an average of 6.8 days, with a median of 2 days, and a range of 1 to 44 days.

3. Just including sharing links won’t guarantee any clicks – 35 percent of email messages get no such clicks. In fact, the average email sharing link click-through rate (based on unique clicks divided by emails delivered) averages just 0.5 percent. In addition:

• Social email click-through rates tend to vary from less than 0.1 percent to as much as 38.7 percent.
• 8.1 percent of emails have social CTRs of more than 1 percent.
• 49 percent of emails have social email CTRs of 0.1 percent or less.

Silverpop makes the point that while the average social email CTR of 0.5 percent is rather low, it’s probably several times higher than the average CTR on email ‘Forward to a Friend’ (FTAF) links.

4. There are no hard-and-fast ways to ensure or increase clicks – Silverpop found little correlation between a range of variables – e.g. the location of the social-sharing link in the email, offer type, whether an offer was included in the subject line, format of the email, etc. – and the likelihood that a message would be shared.

5. You’re more likely to get clicks on Facebook sharing links than any other kind – probably because Facebook dominates social networks. MySpace, Twitter and Digg sharing links also tend to be clicked on.

Crucially, though, it really depends on which networks YOUR subscribers are likely to be actively involved in. So, for example, if your subscriber base is heavily involved in LinkedIn, you’re better off including a sharing link to LinkedIn.

It may also make sense to include just a few of the most popular social network links (among your audience) rather than a large array of links. Not only will this likely be more relevant to your target market, but it may also decrease the risk of indecision and lack of sharing.

Indeed, Silverpop found that 23 percent of emails linked to 4 networks, 60 percent linked to 4 or 5 networks, and 16 percent of emails linked to 6 or more networks.

6. On average, your email will garner an additional 1 percent of views when shared on social networks. Silverpop expects this percentage to grow as social sharing becomes more mainstream.

7. Shared email has a powerful ‘multiplier effect’ – Silverpop estimates that a posted email message has an average increase in reach of 24.3 percent (based on original emails delivered). Furthermore, it expects this figure to increase exponentially as sharing becomes more popular.

All very interesting… but how do YOU harness social sharing in your emails? Look out for tomorrow’s edition of Kikabink News when we consider the ‘best practice’ recommendations for maximizing email sharing on the social networks…

Source: Silverpop, “Emails Gone Viral: Measuring Share to Social Performance,” Silverpop, October 2009

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 6:46 pm and is filed under Email Marketing, Feature, Social Media, Viral Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.