Hey small-to-mid-sized enterprise: are you sending out creative promotional emails, but somehow cannot make your audience to click? No worries, according to a study from email marketing technology firm GetResponse, promotional emails sent by SME marketers that include links to at least one social network have a 30% higher average click-through rate (CTR) than emails without the links. Mailing without any social network links have a 7,2% CTR while email messages with these links can have a CTR up to 9.4%.
More links, the better.
Promotional emails with only one social network link has an average CTR of 8.7%. Nice result, yet by only including two social network links the CTR increases up to 9.3%. It is a 7% growth from emails with only one link and 29% increase from emails with no links.
Wait, it is getting better! Emails with three or more social media links have an average 11.2% CTR. It is 20% higher than emails with two links, 28% higher than emails with one link and 55% higher than emails without links.
Which social media links to use?
According to the study, Twitter leads the way with a CTR of 10,2%, followed by Facebook (9,1%), MySpace (8,7%) and LinkedIn (7,2%). Digg is in the bottom with the lowest CTR (5.3%). However, if you are not targeting the US, the best way is to check which Social Media platforms/tools are the most popular in your market/country. For example, French do not like Twitter and user rate is very low: if the user does not have Twitter account, he is not likely to click. What comes to professional emailing, in Germany it is better to include link to Xing and in France to Viadeo, since these two are more popular than LinkedIn in these markets.
Get ahead of the competition
Surprisingly most SME Marketers do not use Social Media in Emailing. According to another study by GetResponse, only 18.7% of SME marketers include a link to their Twitter accounts in promotional emailing and only 13.5% had a link to Social Media networks. It means that by including Social Media links to your promotional emails you might obtain a competitive advantage and gain more audience than your competitors.
Thanks for the great blog post! It’s always interesting to see how social media impacts society in different ways, and to see what does and doesn’t work.
I’m just about to embark on adding this information and links to my marketing and sales campaigns. Hopefully I can test this out and gain results in practice. Thank you.
Best luck! Let me know if you improved results:)