Most of us at one time or another been forwarded a great email campaign, or have passed one along ourselves. But as email marketers, we know that creating a successful viral campaign is actually pretty tough to do. Email forward rates are low; recipients find forwarding to large groups time-consuming, or they worry that you’ll spam their friends if they use your form. For marketers, forwarding can break your HTML, and it can be difficult to track actions on the forwarded message.
But what if it suddenly got a whole lot easier for your campaigns to spread? If your recipients could quickly and easily share their favorite email messages, so that your message could reach not only your customers, but their friends, and their friends, too? And what if you could identify which recipients shared your content, and how many views and clicks each piece of shared content generated? Imagine what you could do with that kind of information.
By integrating social networking and email marketing, you can do exactly that. We at Silverpop have developed an exciting new “share-to-social” feature that allows email marketers to quickly turn emails into social-enabled viral messages. By clicking a button in their email message, recipients can quickly post the email to the profile page on their social network page—Facebook and MySpace for now, with more to come.
Branching out into social networks is a natural evolution for email. After all, social marketing is first and foremost about relationships, and successful email marketers have learned to engage customers in timely and relevant relationships. Social email marketing’s success rests on the ability to reach the right people with the right message—one they’ll want to share with others.
