It looked at social media sharing via Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn in more than 2,200m emails sent by GetResponse customers. The major outcome was that the number of users who include social sharing buttons in their emails increased to 18.3% - an increase of 40% from last year. Social sharing is everywhere these days; on every post, on most sites, with a multitude of companies providing free tools to make it easy. It fosters more engagement, drives traffic and extends the reach of content around the web. GetResponse's study and infographic below reminds us that this isn't just about social media; marketers are also catching on to the power of connecting the dots and bringing email into the mix. Of those that already do this, the company's research found that 51.9% included only one social share icon, 40.6% included two, 7.4% included three, and 0.1% included four icons. As pointed out above, this is an improvement - but these levels are still comparatively low, especially when compared with the exceptionally high performance results for newsletters that included social sharing buttons. Those emails had a click-through-rate (CTR) of up to 115% higher. 5.6% CTR for emails that included social sharing icons, versus 2.6% CTR for those that did not. The company ran similar analysis last June, also within its client base. Back then you needed to do a lot more; offering at least three social options led to 55% higher click-through rates. Whereas an email message with a social sharing option generated just 30% higher click-throughs than emails without any social sharing links. So, we see that both uptake of social sharing within email – and the results you get from doing this – are growing. Even if this shift is still relatively slow. source: eConsultancy
