Social Sharing Icons Boost Email CTR

Links enabling users to share content are ubiquitous these days, on anything from blog posts to news articles and even internet marketing emails. However, what evidence do we have that adding such sharing options increases the reach of the message?

Well, according to a new report by email marketing provider GetResponse, adding social sharing options into email can improve response rates significantly.

The research found that almost a fifth, 18.3 per cent, of marketers were now including social sharing icons into their emails, which was an increase of 40 per cent over this time last year. Just over half of them only included one such icon, with 40.6 per cent including two, 7.4 per cent including three and 0.1 per cent putting four icons on their email. Facebook, placed on 91 per cent of the emails that had sharing icons.

By analysing over 2,200 million sent emails, GetResponse discovered that emails with sharing options generated a click through rate of 5.6 per cent on average, considerably higher than the 2.6 per cent average CTR achieved by those without sharing options. Emails with LinkedIn sharing icons generated a staggering 9.6 per cent CTR on average, well above the norm. On average, emails were getting 23 shares on Facebook for every 10,000 emails opened, as well as seven tweets and four shares on LinkedIn.

It would seem that consumers' urge to feel they can share anything they are remotely interested in seems to translate into interest in content that allows them to do so, even if they do not end up actually sharing it in the end.