Emails Gone Viral: Measuring “Share to Social

Transcription

Emails Gone Viral: Measuring “Share to Social
Silverpop
From First Click to Lifetime Customer
WHITE P A P E R
Emails Gone
Viral: Measuring
“Share to Social”
Performance
A Silverpop Benchmark Study
Engagement Marketing Solutions
Silverpop
Engagement Marketing Solutions
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EMAILS GONE VIRAL: MEASURING
“SHARE TO SOCIAL” PERFORMANCE
A Silverpop benchmark study
Executive Summary
A
lthough the concept of sharing email messages with social
networks is still in its infancy, Silverpop launched this study of data
generated by our Share-to-Social feature to measure the current state
of “social sharing” activity and to understand what motivates recipients
to share email messages with their trusted social networks.
We hope this study provides insights to companies deploying or planning
to deploy share-to-social functionality so they can maximize the opportunities of this emerging viral technique.
With this report, we have created a series of benchmarks against which
marketers can measure their own social activity. These benchmarks
establish a baseline for future studies that will examine whether sharing
activity or metrics change as the practice spreads from early-adopting
email recipients and marketers to the mainstream.
The findings are presented in the form of questions marketers often
have about social sharing and email, such as: Which networks should I
include? How many? Which ones generate the most clicks on my shared
messages? Background information and best-practice recommendations
presented after the findings will help you sharpen your share-to-social
focus for maximum benefit.
What Did We Learn?
1. Most companies strike a middle ground. A majority of email messages intended for sharing include four to five social sharing links.
2. The life of a shared message is about one week. Email messages
generate clicks on sharing links for an average of 6.8 days, median
of two days, ranging from one day to 44 days.
3. Including sharing links isn’t enough. Thirty-five percent of email
messages studied generated no social email clicks. Simply including
sharing links doesn’t cut it.
4. Click-through rates are inconsistent. We found little correlation
between many variables, such as 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. Facebook dominates among social networks. No matter what
you measure, if Facebook is one of your variables, it will generally
outperform other networks—but there are exceptions.
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6. View rates have room to grow. On average, your email will collect
an additional 1 percent of views when shared on networks, a number
we expect will grow as social sharing moves into the mainstream.
7. Shared email has a powerful “multiplier effect.” Using conservative numbers, our model estimates a posted email message has an
average increase in reach of 24.3 percent (based on original emails
delivered), but we also expect this figure to increase exponentially
once sharing becomes mainstream.
Survey Methodology
Silverpop researchers reviewed 562 email messages containing links to
social networking sites that were sent from 98 business-to-consumer
companies and 16 business-to-business firms to more than 54 million
recipients. We analyzed data from email and social network sharing activity and also evaluated these creative variables:
1. Use of a brand or product name in the subject line
2. Use of offer in the subject line
3. Average viral life of emails on social networks
4. Design format of the emails
5. Position within the email of links to social networks
6. Popularity of various social networks
“Right now, your customers are writing about your products on blogs and
recutting your commercials on YouTube. They’re defining you on Wikipedia
and ganging up on you on social networking sites like Facebook. These
are all elements of a social phenomenon that has created a permanent
shift in the way the world works. Most companies see it as a threat. You
can see it as an opportunity.”
— Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff,
“Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies”
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Study Findings: Answering Marketers’ Frequently Asked Questions
1. Which social network links should I include in my messages?
According to Nielsen, Facebook is the world’s most popular social network.
It has more than 250 million users, almost half of which log on every day.
Three in 10 people online around the world visit it each month.
Facebook also receives the greatest amount of shared content, according to a study by widget maker AddToAny of the networks to which users
of its content-sharing button post the most links. Its research found 24
percent of users posted content on Facebook, followed by 11.1 percent
who generated email messages with shared links and 10.8 percent who
posted to Twitter.
Not surprisingly, every social email evaluated by Silverpop included at
least a link to Facebook. MySpace, Twitter and Digg were the next most
frequently included links. While LinkedIn was a distant fifth overall, within
the B2B emails analyzed, 83 percent included a link to LinkedIn.
40%
Number of Social Network Links Used - By Percentage
35%
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
1
2
3
%
Percent of Email in Which Links to
Specific Networks Were Included
4
5
6
7
8
Although our research didn’t discover the magic number of links to
include, narrowing your focus to just the most important ones will help you
increase viral activity among the key few. Combine your survey data with
analysis of which networks over time are delivering the most sharing activity to narrow (or expand) your message’s universe of social networks.
Bebo
Reddit
Delicious
LinkedIn
Digg
3. Which social networks get shared most often?
The Average Email Share Rate by Network is designed to understand
the relative frequency of sharing per each network. To set a baseline, we
calculated the individual number of shares per social network and divided
by the total number of unique clicks per message.
Twitter
MySpace
Facebook
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
Takeaway: While including share links to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter
are safe bets, it is critical that you identify on which networks your subscribers are most active. Utilize third-party research such as Forrester’s
Technographics profiles and ask subscribers when they opt in, as part of a
subscriber profile, or in a stand-alone subscriber survey.
2. How many social network links should I include in my email messages?
We counted the number of network links each email message provided,
whether as a text link or an icon.
• Average number of social networks included in messages: 4.5
• Median number of networks included in messages: 4
• Number of networks ranged from 1 to 8 (The Silverpop Share-toSocial feature offered eight social networks at the time of the study.)
• 16% linked to 6 or more networks
• 60% linked to 4 or 5 networks
• 23% linked to 4 networks
Takeaway: There is no “correct” or definitive number of social sharing
links to include in your emails. What’s more important is to ensure that you
include links to the networks and sharing sites that align best with your
content, value proposition and your subscribers’ social activities.
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Interestingly, while links to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter were included
most often in email messages, Bebo, Delicious and LinkedIn actually had a
higher percentage of share link clicks among the networks.
Average Email Share Rate by Network
6.00%
5.13%
5.41%
5.00%
4.13%
4.00%
3.99%
3.88%
3.07%
3.00%
3.22%
3.17%
2.00%
1.71%
1.19%
1.24%
1.00%
0.85%
1.48%
0.95%
0.83%
0.96%
0.00%
Bebo
Average
Median
Delicious
Digg
Facebook
LinkedIn
MySpace
Reddit
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Twitter
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We surmise that while marketers included share links to these networks
(Reddit, Bebo, Delicious and LinkedIn) less frequently, when they did
include these links, they were more closely aligned with their subscriber
base and social habits.
For example, while it is safe to include a Facebook link in just about any
email, content-oriented and networking-oriented emails would be more
likely to be shared to Delicious and LinkedIn, respectively.
Takeaway: Align the social networks you choose for your email messages with the demographics and motivations of your subscribers and the
content and value proposition of your emails. Getting this element right will
greatly increase the rate of sharing from your emails.
4. What kind of click-through rates do
shared messages generate?
The Social Email Click-through Rate
measures the click-through rate on the
share links in the emails. It is calculated the
same as email CTR: unique clicks divided by
emails delivered.
• The average across all messages in the
study is 0.5 percent.
• Social Email Click-through Rates ranged
from a low of less than 0.1 percent to a
high of 38.7 percent.
• 8.1 percent of emails have social CTRs
of more than 1 percent.
• 49 percent of the email messages have
social email CTRs of 0.1 percent or less.
• While the average social email CTR of
0.5% may not seem very impressive,
it is roughly 1/10th of the average 4.7
percent CTR measured on the emails in
this study.
• It’s also several times higher than the
average CTR on email “Forward to a
Friend” (FTAF) links. While we are not aware of any industry studies
on FTAF, we believe most marketers are seeing CTRs from about
0.01 percent to 0.1 percent.
Takeaway: The low (0.1 percent or less) social email CTR on nearly half of
emails may appear discouraging, but it actually confirms our expectation
that social sharing success takes much more effort than just slapping in a
few share links.
Variables such as link location (placing the social network links at the
top, in the middle or at the bottom of an email message) or design (text
links versus the networks’ official icons) can have an impact on sharing,
but those aspects are less important and should not be the focus of your
testing efforts. For roughly the same production effort, however, the 0.5
percent average social email CTR is significantly higher than the CTR on
email FTAF links, and the viral reach is much greater than with FTAF.
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5. What percentage of overall clicks can I expect from social email links?
The Social Email Clicks to Email Clicks metric measures how effective
your email was in generating share clicks as a percentage of the overall
click-through rate of an email. It answers the question, “Of the recipients
who clicked my email, how effective was my content, design, network
options and other factors in motivating them to also click a share link with
the intent to share?” It is calculated as unique email share clicks divided
by the total unique email clicks.
• The average for the study emails is 8.7 percent, meaning that a little
less than one of every 10 clicks in the average email is on a share link.
• The median is 3.1 percent.
• Social email clicks as a percentage of overall clicks range from 0.1
percent to 100 percent.
• In the top-performing quartile, the average is 25.5 percent with a
median 19.9 percent.
• In the bottom quartile, both the average and the median are 0.5 percent.
• In essence, for the emails in the top performing quartile, roughly 1/5
to 1/4 of the clicks in the email were on a share-to-social link.
• Some differences we uncovered between the top and bottom quartiles based on this metric:
• Messages in the top quartile are more likely to brand the subject line
(42 percent) than messages in the bottom quartile (23 percent).
• Messages in the top quartile are less likely to mention an offer in
the subject line (36 percent) than the bottom quartile (55 percent).
• Layout likely has some impact: Messages in the top quartile are
more likely to be emails with mostly text (44 percent) compared
to messages in the bottom quartile, where 24 percent were
considered mostly text.
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Takeaways:
• Although it’s not conclusive in this study, the greater prevalence of
brand names in the subject line of more frequently shared email
messages supports a common belief that trust and affinity are
important motivators of sharing. (See the following section for more
explanations about what prompts people to share content.)
• Also, the lower propensity to use offer-based subject lines among
email messages in the top quartile supports our expectation that the
subscriber’s own inner motivations are superior drivers of sharing
over offers with simple price cuts or savings.
• We can only conjecture why the emails with higher share link CTRs
had a higher propensity to be mostly text-based emails. It is likely
that many of these “text-based” emails were short, focused and
lacked the multitude of products, articles, images and other attributes
of image-oriented emails. This singularity may have made it more
logical for recipients to share these emails with their networks.
6. Where should I put my social-network links to encourage more
sharing: at the top, in the middle or at the bottom?
As with so many email-related questions, this one has two responses,
neither of which directly answers the question: 1) “It depends,” and
2) “Whichever location you pick, test it, test it and test it again.”
We looked at where marketers placed their social-network links, either at the
top, in the middle or at the bottom to see if we could uncover any trends.
While the majority of email marketers added social links to the bottom of
the message, we could find no conclusive evidence to show that one location increased sharing more than another. All link positions saw messages
with both high and low sharing rates, although the messages with links
located at the bottom had a greater percentage of high share rates.
However, without conducting A/B split testing to compare one location
over another, we aren’t prepared yet to announce the bottom as the best
location for share links.
Percentage of emails with Various
Social Link Positions
12%
5%
Top
83%
Middle
Bottom
Takeaway: Consider starting with your share links in the familiar administrative area at the bottom of your messages, but focus more on design,
copy and value proposition. Then conduct various split tests over several
messages to determine what approach works best for you. Additionally,
some Silverpop clients who have tested location and style have found
that the treatment and copy surrounding the share link is ultimately more
important than link location.
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7. How many people will view my message once it gets posted on a
network?
The Social Email View Rate conveys how many additional people viewed
an email message after it was posted on a social network. It is expressed
as a percentage of email unique opens and is calculated by dividing the
total social network email opens by the unique number of email opens.
• The overall average is 1 percent, and the median is 0.06 percent.
• Nearly 11 percent of email messages see an additional 1 percent of
email views.
• In the top performing quartile, the average is 3.9 percent, with a
median of 0.6 percent.
• The highest lift was 292 percent.
How to understand this metric: Assume 100,000 recipients opened
your message. On average, an additional 1,000 people viewed your message from a share on a network. For a top performer, a shared message
would generate an average additional 3,900 views (or opens).
Takeaway: We believe that an average bump of an additional 1 percent of
email views is quite encouraging at this stage of sharing adoption by both
senders and recipients. Expect to see this additional view rate increase
steadily as marketers increasingly understand what makes their emails
shareworthy and subscribers become more comfortable sharing email
content across their social networks.
8. Which social networks will generate the most views on messages
posted to a network?
Social Network Effectiveness measures the comparative performance of
major social networks for driving social network views. It is calculated by
dividing the number of social network views by social email clicks (the
recipient’s click on a social network link or icon on the email message).
In simpler terms, this metric conveys the percentage of share link clicks
that result in emails being viewed on the network—hence “network
effectiveness.”
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Facebook:
Takeaway: As with email in the inbox, you can expect the most opens and
clicks of shared emails on social networks to occur in the first couple of days
following delivery. If you are incorporating more social and viral activity into
your marketing, keep in mind that maintaining a constant flow of viral activity
will likely require a new message about every five to seven days.
• Average: 68.3 percent
• Top quartile average is 194.7% with median 133.3%
• Emails in the bottom quartile generated no views
MySpace:
• Average: 4.6%
• Top quartile average is 18.4% with median 5.6%
• Emails in the bottom quartile generated no views
10. How can I estimate the number of additional people who will see
my email once it is posted to a social network?
The Estimated Social Reach Rate metric is an estimate of the reach of a
shared email. Answering this question is difficult because so many variables
affect the outcome, and tracking actual reach is not possible across most of
the networks. However, we developed a model that you can use and modify
as appropriate to estimate your additional email reach via social sharing.
Twitter:
• Average: 5%
• Top quartile average is 20.1% with median 4.8%
• Emails in the bottom quartile generated no views
Two caveats: First, Silverpop cannot track how many email shares were
actually completed on a network, only how many share links were clicked.
Second, we do not know how many “friends” each person has on a network, so we can’t estimate how large of a population potentially could be
exposed to an email share on that network.
Social Network Effectiveness
Top Quartile - Average
Twitter
MySpace
Facebook
Average
0
50
100
150
200
The social networks and sharing sites Twitter, Bebo, Delicious, Digg, LinkedIn
and Reddit all generated minimal network views. This may mean that users
view these networks more as “post-to” rather than “open/view” networks.
Of all the networks in the study, only Facebook had a strong Social
Network Effectiveness. More than one quarter of Facebook messages
had an effectiveness rate of at least 100 percent.
Takeaway: This data clearly suggests the importance of creating highly
“usable” default content to ensure and increase the likelihood the content will
actually be posted and then viewed. As with all marketing content, test your
share content in advance to see how it is presented to social network viewers.
9. How long will my shared email messages generate clicks
on the networks?
To measure the active life of a shared message, we created a new metric,
Life of Share Activity, to determine how many days a shared email message saw opens or clicks after being posted on a network.
Although several factors can influence the “life of a share,” such as an offer
expiration or a subject line that extends interest, in general expect the greatest
percentage of sharing (66%) to occur from one to five days after email delivery.
• Average Life of Share Activity is 6.8 days
• Median Life of Share Activity is 2 days
• Subscriber activity ranged from a low of 1 day to a high of 44 days
• 18 percent of messages had sharing activity for more than 2 weeks
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To create a reliable estimate, our model assumes:
• 50 percent of the people that click on a share link end up actually posting
the share. This obviously varies widely by network, the content, etc.—but
a 50 percent completion rate is probably a conservative rate.
• The average person has 100 friends in his/her network. Again, this varies
widely by individual, demographic and network. According to an article in
The Economist magazine, Facebook sociologist Cameron Marlow found
that the average Facebook user has 120 “friends.”
The Model: Number of Social Email Clicks (share links clicked) multiplied
by estimated share completion rate (50 percent) multiplied by estimated
average number of social friends per person (100) divided by emails
delivered equals estimated social reach rate.
Real-Life Email Example: Here’s how the model works using an actual
email from this study: 5,021 share links clicked X 50 percent estimated
share completion X 100 social friends/111,954 emails delivered= 224%
increase in reach. In this example, the email share content would have
an estimated reach of 251,050.
Based on this model, here are study findings regarding the Estimated
Social Reach Rate:
• Average is 24.3%
• Median is 5.4%
• Top quartile average is 55.1% with median 13.8%
• Bottom quartile average is 6.8% with median 1.7%
• High is 1,933%
Takeaway: While the assumptions in our model are certainly debatable,
we hope you’ll find the model itself valuable in estimating the additional
reach of your emails. Modify the model to fit any insight you have on your
subscribers. For example, if they tend to be early adopters and active on
Twitter, you might take your average up to a few hundred friends. If they
are teens on MySpace, perhaps you cut the average number of friends but
increase the share completion rate.
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Also, consider modifying this “reach” metric to reflect social media impressions. The Facebook research we referred to earlier notes that although
members have 120 friends on average, they typically only actively interact
with about five to 10 of their friends.
Finally, whatever model you use, metrics such as Estimated Social Reach
Rate are an important part of measuring the success of email share-to-social
efforts. Because sharing emails to social networks is still so new, the practice
is actually several phases behind social network usage itself. So, the greater
value is in the viral multiplier effect that happens once an email is shared. As
share-to-social adoption grows, the value of this exciting new functionality and
process will grow exponentially.
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Altruism: People share content because they believe their network or
friends will want to know about it. Sharing makes them feel good.
Validation: Sharing certain kinds of content validates the sharer’s sense
of worth, expertise or views. Sharing feeds the ego.
Affinity: When people have common interests, they want to share news,
articles and other information with like-minded friends and contacts.
Sharing makes people feel more a part of their community.
Prurience: Sharing makes people feel less guilty for gawking at other
people’s misfortunes.
Making These Study Results Work for You
Social Sharing Success Requires More than Simply
Inserting Share Links into Email
Silverpop client experiences have shown that email subscribers are more than willing to share email messages
with their friends and peers when they can post them easily
to their social networks.
Getting email to go viral through traditional methods is
difficult. Silverpop’s “2006 Email List Growth Survey” found
that while 24 percent of respondents said they plan to
implement a viral marketing campaign, only 10 percent
who had done so said they were successful.
Further, Forward-to-a-Friend links don’t extend your email
message as far as social sharing can. Without offering
incentives, you can typically expect forward rates of only a
few tenths of 1 percent.
However, the practice of sharing Web content has now spilled over into
email content sharing on trusted social networks. Email marketers who
can craft message that recipients not only anticipate receiving but also
find relevant enough to share with friends will find social sharing can
dramatically extend their reach.
To understand how to create highly viral or “shareworthy” messages, you
need to first know what motivates content sharers. Although the concepts
outlined below were not designed specifically with email
in mind, they do apply directly to email sharers.
What Is “Shareworthy” Content?
These elements can help make an email message a candidate for
sharing on social networks:
Trustworthiness. Sharing content involves some risk for subscribers,
because they are attaching their personal brand to yours. If your brand’s
trustworthiness is questionable or in decline, sharing your email is likely
to be the last thing on a subscriber’s mind.
Tribal interests. You must know what “tribes” (determined by customer
demographics or personas) comprise your list and what motivates these
groups of like-minded individuals.
Why Do People Share Content?
Simple and obvious. If something is complicated or requires an explanation, the recipient will realize that it will fall on deaf ears and will have
little motivation to share. One exception: People who want you to think
they are brilliant will be excited to show you just how smart they are.
Contributing to the conversation: The goal or impulse to share is to
further a conversation. Sharing benefits people through the value of the
information shared in return.
Ease of sharing. If the recipient has to spend too much energy to
share the content, few will bother.
Paraphrased below are the most common impulses that compel sharing,
according to Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, authors of Groundswell, a
must-read for anyone exploring social media practices:
Self-interest: Sharing provides personal benefit through points, discounts,
freebies, etc. Sharing rewards the pocketbook.
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Social acumen and adoption of subscribers. While social networks
have gone mainstream, your subscribers’ use might vary widely, from
near 100 percent to very low.
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Creates value. Your message must provide
value to your recipients before they will
share with their networks. One exception:
when people know that a particular topic or
offer is extremely relevant to friends, even
though they don’t benefit personally.
Take the long view. Don’t despair if the clicks
come slowly. A subscriber database full of
20-somethings will likely take to sharing more
quickly than a B2B list of C-level executives.
It will also take many months of testing and
observing to find your sharing sweet spot.
Reward/Incentives. These can increase
your forward or share rates, but “rewards”
that tap into sharing motivations, as outlined
above, will likely deliver a better ROI than a
chance to win an iPod.
Design for sharing. Group all your viral
features to capture both social networkers and
email forwarders. Don’t overlook any opportunity to go viral. Consider designating specific
messages to focus specifically on social sharing and list building. Design the emails from the
subject line to the offer, copy and sharing link
placement to encourage sharing—particularly
from your most influential sharers.
Content. Your messages must be wellwritten, timely and relevant, with a clear
value proposition, call to action and appeal
for sharing.
Best Practices for Social Email
Sharing
Overview: Although we were surprised initially to find little consistency in which kinds
of email messages were shared the most or
drew the most social network views, that in
itself indicates that social sharing is something that’s highly unique to your
company, your brand, your email database and the demographics and
social acumen of your email recipients.
It also means that the most frequently heard advice for success in email
marketing also applies to social sharing of email messages: Test every aspect of your email messages to determine what spurs greater social sharing
and, subsequently, greater social-network opens, clicks and conversions.
Silverpop Recommends:
Educate your readers. Don’t just drop icons into your message template
and expect sharing to take off. Highlight your social-sharing option in
your welcome messages and regular mailings. For maximum exposure,
launch your social sharing in a special message or devote prime space
in your regular message to highlight the location and use of your sharing
icons or links.
Reward your persuaders. Recognize the email recipients who regularly
share your messaging with social networks, and pay particularly close
attention to your most active sharers. Acknowledge their contributions
by giving them more than what others might get: coupons with deeper
discounts, first to receive new product announcements, etc. Work with
them and reward them.
Test, test, test. While some of the best practices of email marketing
still work when encouraging recipients to post messages on social sites,
there are differences and nuances in what generates the highest results.
Because share-to-social is still so new, the various best practices are still
emerging and have yet to be discovered or agreed upon. Testing is the key
to incorporating social media into the mix.
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Make sharing worth the effort. Give customers
a good reason to share your promotional emails
with their friends, and make it easy for them
to connect by including links within the email
to their favorite social sites. Turn them into
a powerful extension of your acquisition and
awareness efforts - helping
you to reach highly qualified
prospective customers who
share the same interests as
your brand’s most engaged
email recipients. Doing so will
drive revenue and lifetime
customer loyalty.
Conclusion: Social Sharing is the New and Better
Forward-to-a-Friend
The findings in this study support our contention that social sharing, while
not as prominent yet in email messages as the FTAF link, has already surpassed FTAF in extending the reach of an email message.
What makes email social sharing worth the effort to implement is the vast
actual and potential increase in reach. Email forwarding will typically reach
only a handful of friends, generated when a subscriber uses the forward
button in his email client or an FTAF function.
Although social sharing among subscribers is still a new concept, the
potential to extend your email message reach to hundreds of recipients
per individual share activity exists today.
However, success with social sharing requires effort: choosing the links
that resonate most with your subscribers, providing the kind of content
that appeals to your subscribers’ sharing motivations and embodies the
elements that promote “shareworthiness” as defined in the previous section, educating subscribers about how to share content using your links
and testing repeatedly to make sure your social-sharing program is as
effective as it should be.
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This study is not intended to be the final word on the metrics and utility of social
sharing. We expect to learn more as the practice spreads from early adopters to
the mainstream and to collect more data in the future to map the evolution and
expansion of share-to-social. We invite you to share your thoughts, questions and
ideas for future research. You’ll find contact information via email, telephone and
our corporate blogs in the last section of this paper.
Resources for More Information
1. Download the recorded Webinar “Email Marketing Goes Social: What It
Takes to Make Email Sharing Work” for insights into on how to leverage
your existing email marketing efforts to tap into social marketing. Listed
with the Webinar description are links to more resources on the
Silverpop Web site.
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2. Read more about Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed
by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff at Forrester’s
“Groundswell” blog.
3. Follow the latest social-media developments on the blog “Mashable.”
4. Read insights into the integration of email and social marketing by
Loren McDonald, Silverpop’s vice president for industry relations, in
MediaPost’s Email Insider column every other Thursday.
5. Stay up to date with news, trends and events in social sharing,
email marketing, lead generation and share your comments on digital
marketing topics on Silverpop’s Engagement Marketing and Demand
Generation blogs.
To find out more about Silverpop’s Engage solution and how it can benefit your company, please contact us toll-free
at 1-866/SILVPOP (745-8767) or email us at [email protected].
Visit us at www.silverpop.com
www.silverpop.com
1-866-SILVPOP (745-8767)
© 2009 Copyright Silverpop. All rights reserved. The Silverpop logo is a registered trademark of Silverpop Systems Inc.
9
Engagement Marketing Solutions
SURVEY
SHARE-TO-SOCIAL
SILVERPOP ENGAGE SHARE-TO-SOCIAL
Tap into the power of social marketing
Now you can:
• Discover untapped markets
• Grow your audience
• Increase the reach of your message
• Identify your most influential customers
S
hare-to-Social is a groundbreaking feature of the Silverpop Engage platform that brings each
of these goals into reach, making it the first marketing technology provider to incorporate the
ability to easily share email marketing messages on social networking sites and pull detailed
reports on the results. Silverpop allows you to easily tap into the power of social networks such
as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg and Twitter, unlocking a whole new range of possibilities for
Engagement Marketing Solutions
viral marketing that can make your marketing message more effective than ever before.
Make it easy for customers to share your offers with friends in their social networks
Every marketer dreams of creating a strong viral campaign—one that facilitates and encourages people to pass along ideas and
offers to their friends. Yet few are successful. But today, social networks and the relationships they foster represent a greater
potential for sharing information than any other digital marketing channel. Including email. But combine the targeting and metrics
of email with the reach of social networks, and you’ve entered a whole new world of possibilities.
The new Share-to-Social feature in Silverpop Engage does just that—it combines the best of both worlds. Now you can quickly turn your
email communications into socially enabled viral messages. Using links contained within your email message, customers can quickly
share your message to one or more social networks, adding their comments, including images from your message, and more.
It’s point-and-click easy!
Just select the network you want to allow customers to share your message to, and the link automatically appears in your email.
When customers click on the link, your message is posted to their profile pages.
www.silverpop.com
1-866-SILVPOP (745-8767)
© 2009 Copyright Silverpop. All rights reserved. The Silverpop logo is a registered trademark of Silverpop Systems Inc.
Engagement Marketing Solutions
SHARE-TO-SOCIAL
Just think of the possibilities! When your
customers post your message on their favorite
social network sites, everyone connected to them
receives a notification. Their friends can then
view the message and click on links in it to land
on your Web site where they can opt in to receive
your communications directly. They can also post
a comment about the message and share it with
others in their own networks. And that’s a lot of
people! Research has found that social network
users are, on average, connected to between
150 and 200 friends.1
You can even track the viral activity
of your messages
The enhanced reporting
capabilities of Silverpop Engage enable you to identify which of your messages have gone viral, allowing
Engagement Marketing Solutions
you to track message activity at a granular level and target future communications based on that information. You’ll be able to
see how many times a message has been shared on social networks, viewed and clicked.
Identify your most valuable brand influencers
One of the most powerful benefits of the Share-to-Social feature is its ability to pinpoint which customers share your message
on their social networks and cause it to go viral. You’ll be able to quickly build segments targeting customers who post your
message or who generate the most opens or clicks from their shared items. For the first time, you’ll be able to understand which
recipients are your most influential and ardent evangelists. You’ll be able to engage those individuals with specific offers and
content that reward them for their efforts or encourage them to share new content in the future.
Share-to-Social helps you grow your audience
By always including an opt-in link in your messages, you allow social network users who view your offers on friends’ pages to
sign up for future communications from you, providing them with direct access to your content while expanding your subscriber
base. Ultimately, you’ll energize your existing marketing program, turning it into a powerful acquisition tool capable of increasing
your audience and filling your database with highly qualified customers who share the same interests as your most engaged
customers.
The power of social networking is indisputable. Facebook alone comprises more than 60 million active users. It’s time you tapped
into the power of social marketing, and with Share-to-Social, you’ll be well on your way.
Best of all, you can start today—using your current campaigns, lists and creative.
For more information on Silverpop Engage, including on-demand training and other documentation, please contact your
Relationship Manager or Silverpop Support.
1. “The Benefits of Facebook “Friends:” Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites,” by Ellison, Steinfield and
Lampe: Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media Michigan State University; 2007 Journal of Computer-Mediated
Communication
To find out more about Silverpop’s Engage solution and how it can benefit your company, please contact us toll-free
at 1-866/SILVPOP (745-8767) or email us at [email protected].
Visit us at www.silverpop.com
www.silverpop.com
1-866-SILVPOP (745-8767)
© 2009 Copyright Silverpop. All rights reserved. The Silverpop logo is a registered trademark of Silverpop Systems Inc.