Social Sharing Options Boost Email Click-Through Rates
By Anna Johnson on July 11th, 2010Including three (3) or more social sharing options in email results in 55 percent higher click-through rates, according to research by GetResponse.
Email marketing provider GetResponse analyzed nearly 500 million emails sent by 19,149 of its customers and found that email messages that included a social sharing option generated 30 percent higher click-through-rates (CTRs) than emails without a social sharing option. Messages with 3 or more sharing options generated 55 percent higher CTRs.
Detailing the results in its ‘Email Marketing and Social Media Integration Report‘, GetResponse analyzed social media integration and sharing using Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Digg.
Among GetResponse’s findings were that:
- Emails with at least one social sharing option generated over 30 percent higher CTR than emails that did not include any social sharing options.
- Emails with at least 3 social sharing icons got over 55 percent higher CTR than messages without any sharing options.
- 60 percent of all social emails included only one sharing icon. Only 11.2 percent of social emails included 3 icons or more.
- Twitter was the most popular social sharing option, included in 67.2 percent of all social emails; Facebook came in a close second at 62.7 percent.
- Emails shared on Twitter returned CTRs of 10.20 percent – over 40 percent higher than messages not linked to any social media.
Now for a caution about how to interpret and use these results: a higher CTR doesn’t mean getting more of the clicks you want!
Presumably you DO want people to click on sharing options if you include them in your emails, but keep in mind that someone clicking on a sharing option is someone who is NOT be clicking on a link to a product or service offering.
Here at Kikabink News we give you all kinds of click-through options. You can comment on articles, share them with your friends, followers or fans on social networks, click on the ads, and, of course, forward the newsletter.
We offer so much choice – at the cost of lower click-throughs on our ads – because Kikabink News is an Internet marketing newsletter. Among other things, we aim to provide high quality information and give you choice over what to do with that information.
Contrast this to promotional emails where the aim is to get the email recipient to click on a link to a product or service offer. In this case, you really want people to click on the offer link.
So while the opportunity to have people share your email with others may appeal, you’ll do so at the cost of click-throughs to your sales offer and, more importantly, purchases. For this reason, I do NOT recommend including social sharing mechanisms in any email predominately focused on promoting a product or service.
