It’s easy to do but can have a huge impact on the effectiveness of your email communications. It’s social linking, and it’s the latest addition to one of our client newsletters, eBusiness Live.

Produced by ENN for Enterprise Ireland’s eBusiness Unit, eBusiness Live is a granddaddy of the email newsletter space in Ireland, having been produced on a fortnightly basis since issue 1 back in November 1999. It aims to look at various technological developments and explain in practical terms how those can be used by SMEs to their business advantage, both domestically and in reaching out to international markets.

For the last couple of issues the newsletter has been sporting some added livery in the form of social links, so that existing subscribers who feel there’s content of value can easily share this with their own networks on LinkedIn, Twitter or any number of other social/network services. That also extends to providing these social features on specific articles.

In part this was prompted by an increasing body of research which seems to suggest that adding links to social services in email newsletters can have measurable benefits. One of the more recent studies was carried out by email marketing company GetResponse. The company analysed 500 million emails sent by around 20,000 customers, looking at the use of social links in sent messages. Here were the highlights of the study:

• Emails that included at least three social sharing icons generated over 55 percent higher click through rates than messages without any sharing options
• Twitter was the most popular social sharing option, included in 67.2 percent of all social emails; Facebook came in a close second at 62.7 percent.
• Just 13.5 percent included social sharing options

The full report on the study can be downloaded for free, if you cough up your contact details, by going here.

Written by Ralph Averbuch