5 Social E-Mail Trends to Watch

5. New benchmarks measure e-mail social activity.
The study created a set of new measurements specifically for measuring share-to-social activity. Definitions and results for this study include the following:

• Social e-mail click rate. This refers to the additional clicks on shared links per delivered e-mail message. For the study, the social e-mail click rate was 0.5 percent overall, ranging from less than 0.1 percent to 38.7 percent.

• Social e-mail view rate. This refers to how many additional people viewed a message after it was posted on a social network. The study's social e-mail view rate averaged 1 percent, with 3.9 percent for the top 25 percent of performers.
• Social network effectiveness rate. This refers to how well a social network drives additional views. Facebook was far and away the top performer, with an average of 68 percent. This means that, on average, 68 percent of share-link clicks resulted in e-mails being viewed from a post on Facebook. Twitter (5 percent) and MySpace (4.6 percent) were a distant second and third.

Takeaways and best practices
Simply dropping a Facebook or Twitter link into your e-mail messages isn't enough to get your recipients to share them on their social networks. After all, 35 percent of the e-mail messages analyzed for this study generated no clicks on social-sharing links. Social sharing takes effort. To be successful, consider the following best practices:

1. Educate your readers. Explain how the sharing process works and why recipients would want to pass your messages along.
2. Reward your persuaders. Track which subscribers share most frequently. Reward them with offers, inside information or other special treatment.
3. Design for sharing. Group all your viral features to capture both social networkers and e-mail forwarders. Don’t overlook any opportunity to go viral. Designate certain messages to focus specifically on social sharing and list building. Design e-mails from the subject line to the offer to copy and sharing link placement to encourage sharing, particularly from your most influential sharers.

Loren McDonald is the vice president of industry relations for Silverpop, an Atlanta-based provider of engagement marketing tools. Reach Loren at lmcdonald@silverpop.com.