Email Marketing: Social Sharing

A great little stat I came across last week was this one from Marketing Charts. It tells us that emails that include social sharing buttons improve click-thru rate by an average of 115%.

Think about that stat, it’s pretty remarkable. 115% more people click on an email when you include social sharing buttons like Facebook and Twitter. If you average 100 clicks for every newsletter you send out, you just found a way to get 215 clicks. That’s a big difference.

So why wouldn’t you include social sharing buttons in all of your marketing emails?

Well, what if you’re goal is a purchase? What if you are careful to link to the checkout page and only the checkout page to ensure that consumers are taking the proper action and not getting confused or lost in the fold? What if you’re making an offer that is exclusive and you don’t want the customers to share it via Facebook or Twitter?

While 115% click-thru rate improvement is amazing, and should be considered if you have an email marketing program set up, I just wanted to point out that there are reasons to take a step back and think more deeply about a statistic before running with it.

(But if you send out a newsletter with your own content and are not including social sharing buttons, get on that right away.)