Social Sharing Equals Success in Email Marketing

Social media is over-hyped. I get that.

It feels like you can’t open a marketing email anymore without seeing buttons urging you to share the email content across social media channels. Sharing buttons seem so ubiquitous, one starts to wonder if they’re even effective. Have they simply become visual noise that people have learned to ignore on their screen, like display or text ads?

GetResponse set out to answer that question in infographic form. They surveyed over 2,200 million emails sent by over 200,000 of their users worldwide — 9,000 of those were US-based accounts. And what they found might be a little surprising:

• Social sharing isn’t quite as prevalent as I previously thought. Only 18.3% of email marketers included social sharing.
• Of that 18.3% of email marketers who included sharing, over 90% of them included links to Facebook. Only 8.5% of marketers included links to LinkedIn.
• Despite the fact that LinkedIn’s inclusion numbers were so small, LinkedIn had far and away the most successful email click-through rate at 9.6%, with Facebook coming in at 5.4%.
• The click through-rates for emails with social sharing were 115% higher than for those without social sharing links.

Read on for the full infographic — and if you don’t have sharing links in your emails, what are you waiting for?