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Emails Gone Viral: Measuring “Share to Social” Performance

A Silverpop Benchmark Study

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EMAILS GONE VIRAL: MEASURING “SHARE TO SOCIAL” PERFORMANCE A Silverpop benchmark study Executive Summary

A

lthough the concept of sharing email messages with social networks is still in its infancy, Silverpop launched this study of data

generated by our Share-to-Social feature to measure the current state of “social sharing” activity and to understand what motivates recipients to share email messages with their trusted social networks.

We hope this study provides insights to companies deploying or planning to deploy share-to-social functionality so they can maximize the opportunities of this emerging viral technique. With this report, we have created a series of benchmarks against which marketers can measure their own social activity. These benchmarks establish a baseline for future studies that will examine whether sharing activity or metrics change as the practice spreads from early-adopting email recipients and marketers to the mainstream. The findings are presented in the form of questions marketers often have about social sharing and email, such as: Which networks should I include? How many? Which ones generate the most clicks on my shared messages? Background information and best-practice recommendations presented after the findings will help you sharpen your share-to-social focus for maximum benefit.

What Did We Learn?

1. Most companies strike a middle ground. A majority of email messages intended for sharing include four to five social sharing links. 2. The life of a shared message is about one week. Email messages generate clicks on sharing links for an average of 6.8 days, median of two days, ranging from one day to 44 days. 3. Including sharing links isn’t enough. Thirty-five percent of email messages studied generated no social email clicks. Simply including sharing links doesn’t cut it. 4. Click-through rates are inconsistent. We found little correlation between many variables, such as location of the social-sharing link in the email, offer type, whether an offer was included in the subject line, format of the email, etc., and the likelihood that a message would be shared. 5. Facebook dominates among social networks. No matter what you measure, if Facebook is one of your variables, it will generally outperform other networks—but there are exceptions.

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6. View rates have room to grow. On average, your email will collect an additional 1 percent of views when shared on networks, a number we expect will grow as social sharing moves into the mainstream. 7. Shared email has a powerful “multiplier effect.” Using conservative numbers, our model estimates a posted email message has an average increase in reach of 24.3 percent (based on original emails delivered), but we also expect this figure to increase exponentially once sharing becomes mainstream.

Survey Methodology

Silverpop researchers reviewed 562 email messages containing links to social networking sites that were sent from 98 business-to-consumer companies and 16 business-to-business firms to more than 54 million recipients. We analyzed data from email and social network sharing activity and also evaluated these creative variables: 1. Use of a brand or product name in the subject line 2. Use of offer in the subject line 3. Average viral life of emails on social networks 4. Design format of the emails 5. Position within the email of links to social networks 6. Popularity of various social networks “Right now, your customers are writing about your products on blogs and recutting your commercials on YouTube. They’re defining you on Wikipedia and ganging up on you on social networking sites like Facebook. These are all elements of a social phenomenon that has created a permanent shift in the way the world works. Most companies see it as a threat. You can see it as an opportunity.” — Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies”

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Study Findings: Answering Marketers’ Frequently Asked Questions 1. Which social network links should I include in my messages? According to Nielsen, Facebook is the world’s most popular social network. It has more than 250 million users, almost half of which log on every day. Three in 10 people online around the world visit it each month. Facebook also receives the greatest amount of shared content, according to a study by widget maker AddToAny of the networks to which users of its content-sharing button post the most links. Its research found 24 percent of users posted content on Facebook, followed by 11.1 percent who generated email messages with shared links and 10.8 percent who posted to Twitter. Not surprisingly, every social email evaluated by Silverpop included at least a link to Facebook. MySpace, Twitter and Digg were the next most frequently included links. While LinkedIn was a distant fifth overall, within the B2B emails analyzed, 83 percent included a link to LinkedIn.

40%

Number of Social Network Links Used - By Percentage

35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0% 1

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%

Percent of Email in Which Links to Specific Networks Were Included

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Although our research didn’t discover the magic number of links to include, narrowing your focus to just the most important ones will help you increase viral activity among the key few. Combine your survey data with analysis of which networks over time are delivering the most sharing activity to narrow (or expand) your message’s universe of social networks.

Bebo Reddit Delicious LinkedIn Digg

3. Which social networks get shared most often? The Average Email Share Rate by Network is designed to understand the relative frequency of sharing per each network. To set a baseline, we calculated the individual number of shares per social network and divided by the total number of unique clicks per message.

Twitter MySpace Facebook 0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Takeaway: While including share links to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are safe bets, it is critical that you identify on which networks your subscribers are most active. Utilize third-party research such as Forrester’s Technographics profiles and ask subscribers when they opt in, as part of a subscriber profile, or in a stand-alone subscriber survey. 2. How many social network links should I include in my email messages? We counted the number of network links each email message provided, whether as a text link or an icon. • Average number of social networks included in messages: 4.5 • Median number of networks included in messages: 4 • Number of networks ranged from 1 to 8 (The Silverpop Share-toSocial feature offered eight social networks at the time of the study.) • 16% linked to 6 or more networks • 60% linked to 4 or 5 networks • 23% linked to 4 networks Takeaway: There is no “correct” or definitive number of social sharing links to include in your emails. What’s more important is to ensure that you include links to the networks and sharing sites that align best with your content, value proposition and your subscribers’ social activities.

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Interestingly, while links to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter were included most often in email messages, Bebo, Delicious and LinkedIn actually had a higher percentage of share link clicks among the networks. Average Email Share Rate by Network 6.00% 5.13%

5.41%

5.00% 4.13%

4.00%

3.99%

3.88%

3.07%

3.00%

3.22% 3.17%

2.00%

1.71% 1.19%

1.24%

1.00%

0.85%

1.48% 0.95% 0.83%

0.96%

0.00% Bebo Average Median

Delicious

Digg

Facebook

LinkedIn

MySpace

Reddit

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We surmise that while marketers included share links to these networks (Reddit, Bebo, Delicious and LinkedIn) less frequently, when they did include these links, they were more closely aligned with their subscriber base and social habits. For example, while it is safe to include a Facebook link in just about any email, content-oriented and networking-oriented emails would be more likely to be shared to Delicious and LinkedIn, respectively. Takeaway: Align the social networks you choose for your email messages with the demographics and motivations of your subscribers and the content and value proposition of your emails. Getting this element right will greatly increase the rate of sharing from your emails. 4. What kind of click-through rates do shared messages generate? The Social Email Click-through Rate measures the click-through rate on the share links in the emails. It is calculated the same as email CTR: unique clicks divided by emails delivered. • The average across all messages in the study is 0.5 percent. • Social Email Click-through Rates ranged from a low of less than 0.1 percent to a high of 38.7 percent. • 8.1 percent of emails have social CTRs of more than 1 percent. • 49 percent of the email messages have social email CTRs of 0.1 percent or less. • While the average social email CTR of 0.5% may not seem very impressive, it is roughly 1/10th of the average 4.7 percent CTR measured on the emails in this study. • It’s also several times higher than the average CTR on email “Forward to a Friend” (FTAF) links. While we are not aware of any industry studies on FTAF, we believe most marketers are seeing CTRs from about 0.01 percent to 0.1 percent. Takeaway: The low (0.1 percent or less) social email CTR on nearly half of emails may appear discouraging, but it actually confirms our expectation that social sharing success takes much more effort than just slapping in a few share links. Variables such as link location (placing the social network links at the top, in the middle or at the bottom of an email message) or design (text links versus the networks’ official icons) can have an impact on sharing, but those aspects are less important and should not be the focus of your testing efforts. For roughly the same production effort, however, the 0.5 percent average social email CTR is significantly higher than the CTR on email FTAF links, and the viral reach is much greater than with FTAF.

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5. What percentage of overall clicks can I expect from social email links? The Social Email Clicks to Email Clicks metric measures how effective your email was in generating share clicks as a percentage of the overall click-through rate of an email. It answers the question, “Of the recipients who clicked my email, how effective was my content, design, network options and other factors in motivating them to also click a share link with the intent to share?” It is calculated as unique email share clicks divided by the total unique email clicks. • The average for the study emails is 8.7 percent, meaning that a little less than one of every 10 clicks in the average email is on a share link. • The median is 3.1 percent. • Social email clicks as a percentage of overall clicks range from 0.1 percent to 100 percent.

• In the top-performing quartile, the average is 25.5 percent with a median 19.9 percent. • In the bottom quartile, both the average and the median are 0.5 percent. • In essence, for the emails in the top performing quartile, roughly 1/5 to 1/4 of the clicks in the email were on a share-to-social link. • Some differences we uncovered between the top and bottom quartiles based on this metric: • Messages in the top quartile are more likely to brand the subject line (42 percent) than messages in the bottom quartile (23 percent). • Messages in the top quartile are less likely to mention an offer in the subject line (36 percent) than the bottom quartile (55 percent). • Layout likely has some impact: Messages in the top quartile are more likely to be emails with mostly text (44 percent) compared to messages in the bottom quartile, where 24 percent were considered mostly text.

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Takeaways: • Although it’s not conclusive in this study, the greater prevalence of brand names in the subject line of more frequently shared email messages supports a common belief that trust and affinity are important motivators of sharing. (See the following section for more explanations about what prompts people to share content.) • Also, the lower propensity to use offer-based subject lines among email messages in the top quartile supports our expectation that the subscriber’s own inner motivations are superior drivers of sharing over offers with simple price cuts or savings. • We can only conjecture why the emails with higher share link CTRs had a higher propensity to be mostly text-based emails. It is likely that many of these “text-based” emails were short, focused and lacked the multitude of products, articles, images and other attributes of image-oriented emails. This singularity may have made it more logical for recipients to share these emails with their networks. 6. Where should I put my social-network links to encourage more sharing: at the top, in the middle or at the bottom? As with so many email-related questions, this one has two responses, neither of which directly answers the question: 1) “It depends,” and 2) “Whichever location you pick, test it, test it and test it again.” We looked at where marketers placed their social-network links, either at the top, in the middle or at the bottom to see if we could uncover any trends. While the majority of email marketers added social links to the bottom of the message, we could find no conclusive evidence to show that one location increased sharing more than another. All link positions saw messages with both high and low sharing rates, although the messages with links located at the bottom had a greater percentage of high share rates. However, without conducting A/B split testing to compare one location over another, we aren’t prepared yet to announce the bottom as the best location for share links.

Percentage of emails with Various Social Link Positions 12%

5% Top

83%

Middle Bottom

Takeaway: Consider starting with your share links in the familiar administrative area at the bottom of your messages, but focus more on design, copy and value proposition. Then conduct various split tests over several messages to determine what approach works best for you. Additionally, some Silverpop clients who have tested location and style have found that the treatment and copy surrounding the share link is ultimately more important than link location.

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7. How many people will view my message once it gets posted on a network? The Social Email View Rate conveys how many additional people viewed an email message after it was posted on a social network. It is expressed as a percentage of email unique opens and is calculated by dividing the total social network email opens by the unique number of email opens. • The overall average is 1 percent, and the median is 0.06 percent. • Nearly 11 percent of email messages see an additional 1 percent of email views. • In the top performing quartile, the average is 3.9 percent, with a median of 0.6 percent. • The highest lift was 292 percent. How to understand this metric: Assume 100,000 recipients opened your message. On average, an additional 1,000 people viewed your message from a share on a network. For a top performer, a shared message would generate an average additional 3,900 views (or opens). Takeaway: We believe that an average bump of an additional 1 percent of email views is quite encouraging at this stage of sharing adoption by both senders and recipients. Expect to see this additional view rate increase steadily as marketers increasingly understand what makes their emails shareworthy and subscribers become more comfortable sharing email content across their social networks. 8. Which social networks will generate the most views on messages posted to a network? Social Network Effectiveness measures the comparative performance of major social networks for driving social network views. It is calculated by dividing the number of social network views by social email clicks (the recipient’s click on a social network link or icon on the email message). In simpler terms, this metric conveys the percentage of share link clicks that result in emails being viewed on the network—hence “network effectiveness.”

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Facebook:

Takeaway: As with email in the inbox, you can expect the most opens and clicks of shared emails on social networks to occur in the first couple of days following delivery. If you are incorporating more social and viral activity into your marketing, keep in mind that maintaining a constant flow of viral activity will likely require a new message about every five to seven days.

• Average: 68.3 percent • Top quartile average is 194.7% with median 133.3% • Emails in the bottom quartile generated no views

MySpace:

• Average: 4.6% • Top quartile average is 18.4% with median 5.6% • Emails in the bottom quartile generated no views

10. How can I estimate the number of additional people who will see my email once it is posted to a social network? The Estimated Social Reach Rate metric is an estimate of the reach of a shared email. Answering this question is difficult because so many variables affect the outcome, and tracking actual reach is not possible across most of the networks. However, we developed a model that you can use and modify as appropriate to estimate your additional email reach via social sharing.

Twitter:

• Average: 5% • Top quartile average is 20.1% with median 4.8% • Emails in the bottom quartile generated no views

Two caveats: First, Silverpop cannot track how many email shares were actually completed on a network, only how many share links were clicked. Second, we do not know how many “friends” each person has on a network, so we can’t estimate how large of a population potentially could be exposed to an email share on that network.

Social Network Effectiveness

Top Quartile - Average Twitter MySpace Facebook

Average

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The social networks and sharing sites Twitter, Bebo, Delicious, Digg, LinkedIn and Reddit all generated minimal network views. This may mean that users view these networks more as “post-to” rather than “open/view” networks. Of all the networks in the study, only Facebook had a strong Social Network Effectiveness. More than one quarter of Facebook messages had an effectiveness rate of at least 100 percent. Takeaway: This data clearly suggests the importance of creating highly “usable” default content to ensure and increase the likelihood the content will actually be posted and then viewed. As with all marketing content, test your share content in advance to see how it is presented to social network viewers. 9. How long will my shared email messages generate clicks on the networks? To measure the active life of a shared message, we created a new metric, Life of Share Activity, to determine how many days a shared email message saw opens or clicks after being posted on a network. Although several factors can influence the “life of a share,” such as an offer expiration or a subject line that extends interest, in general expect the greatest percentage of sharing (66%) to occur from one to five days after email delivery. • Average Life of Share Activity is 6.8 days • Median Life of Share Activity is 2 days • Subscriber activity ranged from a low of 1 day to a high of 44 days • 18 percent of messages had sharing activity for more than 2 weeks

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To create a reliable estimate, our model assumes: • 50 percent of the people that click on a share link end up actually posting the share. This obviously varies widely by network, the content, etc.—but a 50 percent completion rate is probably a conservative rate. • The average person has 100 friends in his/her network. Again, this varies widely by individual, demographic and network. According to an article in The Economist magazine, Facebook sociologist Cameron Marlow found that the average Facebook user has 120 “friends.” The Model: Number of Social Email Clicks (share links clicked) multiplied by estimated share completion rate (50 percent) multiplied by estimated average number of social friends per person (100) divided by emails delivered equals estimated social reach rate. Real-Life Email Example: Here’s how the model works using an actual email from this study: 5,021 share links clicked X 50 percent estimated share completion X 100 social friends/111,954 emails delivered= 224% increase in reach. In this example, the email share content would have an estimated reach of 251,050. Based on this model, here are study findings regarding the Estimated Social Reach Rate: • Average is 24.3% • Median is 5.4% • Top quartile average is 55.1% with median 13.8% • Bottom quartile average is 6.8% with median 1.7% • High is 1,933% Takeaway: While the assumptions in our model are certainly debatable, we hope you’ll find the model itself valuable in estimating the additional reach of your emails. Modify the model to fit any insight you have on your subscribers. For example, if they tend to be early adopters and active on Twitter, you might take your average up to a few hundred friends. If they are teens on MySpace, perhaps you cut the average number of friends but increase the share completion rate.

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Also, consider modifying this “reach” metric to reflect social media impressions. The Facebook research we referred to earlier notes that although members have 120 friends on average, they typically only actively interact with about five to 10 of their friends. Finally, whatever model you use, metrics such as Estimated Social Reach Rate are an important part of measuring the success of email share-to-social efforts. Because sharing emails to social networks is still so new, the practice is actually several phases behind social network usage itself. So, the greater value is in the viral multiplier effect that happens once an email is shared. As share-to-social adoption grows, the value of this exciting new functionality and process will grow exponentially.

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Altruism: People share content because they believe their network or friends will want to know about it. Sharing makes them feel good. Validation: Sharing certain kinds of content validates the sharer’s sense of worth, expertise or views. Sharing feeds the ego. Affinity: When people have common interests, they want to share news, articles and other information with like-minded friends and contacts. Sharing makes people feel more a part of their community. Prurience: Sharing makes people feel less guilty for gawking at other people’s misfortunes.

Making These Study Results Work for You

Social Sharing Success Requires More than Simply Inserting Share Links into Email Silverpop client experiences have shown that email subscribers are more than willing to share email messages with their friends and peers when they can post them easily to their social networks. Getting email to go viral through traditional methods is difficult. Silverpop’s “2006 Email List Growth Survey” found that while 24 percent of respondents said they plan to implement a viral marketing campaign, only 10 percent who had done so said they were successful. Further, Forward-to-a-Friend links don’t extend your email message as far as social sharing can. Without offering incentives, you can typically expect forward rates of only a few tenths of 1 percent. However, the practice of sharing Web content has now spilled over into email content sharing on trusted social networks. Email marketers who can craft message that recipients not only anticipate receiving but also find relevant enough to share with friends will find social sharing can dramatically extend their reach. To understand how to create highly viral or “shareworthy” messages, you need to first know what motivates content sharers. Although the concepts outlined below were not designed specifically with email in mind, they do apply directly to email sharers.

What Is “Shareworthy” Content?

These elements can help make an email message a candidate for sharing on social networks: Trustworthiness. Sharing content involves some risk for subscribers, because they are attaching their personal brand to yours. If your brand’s trustworthiness is questionable or in decline, sharing your email is likely to be the last thing on a subscriber’s mind. Tribal interests. You must know what “tribes” (determined by customer demographics or personas) comprise your list and what motivates these groups of like-minded individuals.

Why Do People Share Content?

Simple and obvious. If something is complicated or requires an explanation, the recipient will realize that it will fall on deaf ears and will have little motivation to share. One exception: People who want you to think they are brilliant will be excited to show you just how smart they are.

Contributing to the conversation: The goal or impulse to share is to further a conversation. Sharing benefits people through the value of the information shared in return.

Ease of sharing. If the recipient has to spend too much energy to share the content, few will bother.

Paraphrased below are the most common impulses that compel sharing, according to Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, authors of Groundswell, a must-read for anyone exploring social media practices:

Self-interest: Sharing provides personal benefit through points, discounts, freebies, etc. Sharing rewards the pocketbook.

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Social acumen and adoption of subscribers. While social networks have gone mainstream, your subscribers’ use might vary widely, from near 100 percent to very low.

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Creates value. Your message must provide value to your recipients before they will share with their networks. One exception: when people know that a particular topic or offer is extremely relevant to friends, even though they don’t benefit personally.

Take the long view. Don’t despair if the clicks come slowly. A subscriber database full of 20-somethings will likely take to sharing more quickly than a B2B list of C-level executives. It will also take many months of testing and observing to find your sharing sweet spot.

Reward/Incentives. These can increase your forward or share rates, but “rewards” that tap into sharing motivations, as outlined above, will likely deliver a better ROI than a chance to win an iPod.

Design for sharing. Group all your viral features to capture both social networkers and email forwarders. Don’t overlook any opportunity to go viral. Consider designating specific messages to focus specifically on social sharing and list building. Design the emails from the subject line to the offer, copy and sharing link placement to encourage sharing—particularly from your most influential sharers.

Content. Your messages must be wellwritten, timely and relevant, with a clear value proposition, call to action and appeal for sharing.

Best Practices for Social Email Sharing

Overview: Although we were surprised initially to find little consistency in which kinds of email messages were shared the most or drew the most social network views, that in itself indicates that social sharing is something that’s highly unique to your company, your brand, your email database and the demographics and social acumen of your email recipients. It also means that the most frequently heard advice for success in email marketing also applies to social sharing of email messages: Test every aspect of your email messages to determine what spurs greater social sharing and, subsequently, greater social-network opens, clicks and conversions.

Silverpop Recommends:

Educate your readers. Don’t just drop icons into your message template and expect sharing to take off. Highlight your social-sharing option in your welcome messages and regular mailings. For maximum exposure, launch your social sharing in a special message or devote prime space in your regular message to highlight the location and use of your sharing icons or links. Reward your persuaders. Recognize the email recipients who regularly share your messaging with social networks, and pay particularly close attention to your most active sharers. Acknowledge their contributions by giving them more than what others might get: coupons with deeper discounts, first to receive new product announcements, etc. Work with them and reward them. Test, test, test. While some of the best practices of email marketing still work when encouraging recipients to post messages on social sites, there are differences and nuances in what generates the highest results. Because share-to-social is still so new, the various best practices are still emerging and have yet to be discovered or agreed upon. Testing is the key to incorporating social media into the mix.

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Make sharing worth the effort. Give customers a good reason to share your promotional emails with their friends, and make it easy for them to connect by including links within the email to their favorite social sites. Turn them into a powerful extension of your acquisition and awareness efforts - helping you to reach highly qualified prospective customers who share the same interests as your brand’s most engaged email recipients. Doing so will drive revenue and lifetime customer loyalty.

Conclusion: Social Sharing is the New and Better Forward-to-a-Friend

The findings in this study support our contention that social sharing, while not as prominent yet in email messages as the FTAF link, has already surpassed FTAF in extending the reach of an email message. What makes email social sharing worth the effort to implement is the vast actual and potential increase in reach. Email forwarding will typically reach only a handful of friends, generated when a subscriber uses the forward button in his email client or an FTAF function. Although social sharing among subscribers is still a new concept, the potential to extend your email message reach to hundreds of recipients per individual share activity exists today. However, success with social sharing requires effort: choosing the links that resonate most with your subscribers, providing the kind of content that appeals to your subscribers’ sharing motivations and embodies the elements that promote “shareworthiness” as defined in the previous section, educating subscribers about how to share content using your links and testing repeatedly to make sure your social-sharing program is as effective as it should be.

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This study is not intended to be the final word on the metrics and utility of social sharing. We expect to learn more as the practice spreads from early adopters to the mainstream and to collect more data in the future to map the evolution and expansion of share-to-social. We invite you to share your thoughts, questions and ideas for future research. You’ll find contact information via email, telephone and our corporate blogs in the last section of this paper.

Resources for More Information

1. Download the recorded Webinar “Email Marketing Goes Social: What It Takes to Make Email Sharing Work” for insights into on how to leverage your existing email marketing efforts to tap into social marketing. Listed with the Webinar description are links to more resources on the Silverpop Web site.

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2. Read more about Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff at Forrester’s “Groundswell” blog. 3. Follow the latest social-media developments on the blog “Mashable.” 4. Read insights into the integration of email and social marketing by Loren McDonald, Silverpop’s vice president for industry relations, in MediaPost’s Email Insider column every other Thursday. 5. Stay up to date with news, trends and events in social sharing, email marketing, lead generation and share your comments on digital marketing topics on Silverpop’s Engagement Marketing and Demand Generation blogs.

To find out more about Silverpop’s Engage solution and how it can benefit your company, please contact us toll-free at 1-866/SILVPOP (745-8767) or email us at [email protected]. Visit us at www.silverpop.com

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SURVEY SHARE-TO-SOCIAL

SILVERPOP ENGAGE SHARE-TO-SOCIAL Tap into the power of social marketing Now you can: • Discover untapped markets • Grow your audience

• Increase the reach of your message • Identify your most influential customers

S

hare-to-Social is a groundbreaking feature of the Silverpop Engage platform that brings each of these goals into reach, making it the first marketing technology provider to incorporate the ability to easily share email marketing messages on social networking sites and pull detailed reports on the results. Silverpop allows you to easily tap into the power of social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg and Twitter, unlocking a whole new range of possibilities for Engagement Marketing Solutions viral marketing that can make your marketing message more effective than ever before.

Make it easy for customers to share your offers with friends in their social networks Every marketer dreams of creating a strong viral campaign—one that facilitates and encourages people to pass along ideas and offers to their friends. Yet few are successful. But today, social networks and the relationships they foster represent a greater potential for sharing information than any other digital marketing channel. Including email. But combine the targeting and metrics of email with the reach of social networks, and you’ve entered a whole new world of possibilities. The new Share-to-Social feature in Silverpop Engage does just that—it combines the best of both worlds. Now you can quickly turn your email communications into socially enabled viral messages. Using links contained within your email message, customers can quickly share your message to one or more social networks, adding their comments, including images from your message, and more.

It’s point-and-click easy! Just select the network you want to allow customers to share your message to, and the link automatically appears in your email. When customers click on the link, your message is posted to their profile pages. www.silverpop.com

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SHARE-TO-SOCIAL

Just think of the possibilities! When your customers post your message on their favorite social network sites, everyone connected to them receives a notification. Their friends can then view the message and click on links in it to land on your Web site where they can opt in to receive your communications directly. They can also post a comment about the message and share it with others in their own networks. And that’s a lot of people! Research has found that social network users are, on average, connected to between 150 and 200 friends.1 You can even track the viral activity of your messages

The enhanced reporting capabilities of Silverpop Engage enable you to identify which of your messages have gone viral, allowing Engagement Marketing Solutions you to track message activity at a granular level and target future communications based on that information. You’ll be able to see how many times a message has been shared on social networks, viewed and clicked. Identify your most valuable brand influencers

One of the most powerful benefits of the Share-to-Social feature is its ability to pinpoint which customers share your message on their social networks and cause it to go viral. You’ll be able to quickly build segments targeting customers who post your message or who generate the most opens or clicks from their shared items. For the first time, you’ll be able to understand which recipients are your most influential and ardent evangelists. You’ll be able to engage those individuals with specific offers and content that reward them for their efforts or encourage them to share new content in the future.

Share-to-Social helps you grow your audience By always including an opt-in link in your messages, you allow social network users who view your offers on friends’ pages to sign up for future communications from you, providing them with direct access to your content while expanding your subscriber base. Ultimately, you’ll energize your existing marketing program, turning it into a powerful acquisition tool capable of increasing your audience and filling your database with highly qualified customers who share the same interests as your most engaged customers. The power of social networking is indisputable. Facebook alone comprises more than 60 million active users. It’s time you tapped into the power of social marketing, and with Share-to-Social, you’ll be well on your way. Best of all, you can start today—using your current campaigns, lists and creative. For more information on Silverpop Engage, including on-demand training and other documentation, please contact your Relationship Manager or Silverpop Support. 1. “The Benefits of Facebook “Friends:” Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites,” by Ellison, Steinfield and Lampe: Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media Michigan State University; 2007 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication

To find out more about Silverpop’s Engage solution and how it can benefit your company, please contact us toll-free at 1-866/SILVPOP (745-8767) or email us at [email protected]. Visit us at www.silverpop.com

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