One of my first impulses when I read a funny blog post or article online is to have one of my friends read it, too; there is always at least one person I can think of who would get the same kick out of it that I do. I imagine my friends’ comments to me upon reading said blog post or article, whether they will chuckle or belly laugh, and how fast they’ll respond. After building up this momentous imaginary reaction, you can imagine my disappointment when there’s no way to share this content on social media. What am I supposed to do, copy and paste the URL into an email to send to friends whom I may or may not have email addresses for and who may or may not check the ancient email accounts I do have addresses for?
I’m probably not going to do that. You see, I’m a consumer, and I’ve come to expect that the web, my emails, my social accounts and my smart phone should all be connected and connectable. When I get an email from my favorite retailer about a sale it’s having, there better be a way that I can tweet my best friend an alert right from that email so we can go shopping together or by golly, I’m going to be upset.
Enabling your subscribers to share content right from the emails you send them is a must. First, if you don’t include social sharing abilities, you don’t believe in the power of your email content. Creating personalized content is a must for attracting and retaining today’s consumers, so take a good look at your emails and make sure they have excellent, relevant, mobile-optimized content for the subscriber segments to which you are sending. Once that is checked off your list, there is nothing stopping you from including social sharing capabilities so your subscribers can share this great content with the rest of the world. Setting up social sharing in the WhatCounts Smart Marketing Engine is a simple process.
In Professional Edition, when you create an email template, simply click on the Add Tags icon in the top right menu.
Next, choose the tab called Social Tags. You’ll be directed to a screen where you can choose which social networks you’d like to enable for sharing in your email. Below, I’ve chosen to let my readers share the content of this email with their Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest friends, and I’ve chosen what size I want the icon to appear as within the email.
There’s also a space where you can enter additional information depending on whether you’ve chosen certain social media networks. I’ve entered a title, summary and source to be automatically added to a LinkenIn post that someone shares from my email.
Finally, I can click the Generate Share Bar button, and automatically fill my email with a row of buttons that my subscribers can use to share the content of my email directly with their social networks.
In Publicaster Edition, click on Insert Code Snippet in the editing bar when you are in your email template and then choose the Social Media ALL Available option from the dropdown menu.
This will insert a code into your email template, which represents a bar with four social media icons on it:
Here’s to making it possible for your subscribers to share your funny, timely, relevant, lets-go-shopping-now content with all of their friends!
Joy Ugi
Digital Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts
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