The already classical and ubiquitous “recommend” button that you will always find in newsletters and other emailed messages is probably the first facility ever that enabled subscribers to interact with their incoming messages and, moreover, to become ambassadors of a brand that uses one-to-one communication in their relationship with existing and prospective clients.

Recently, ever since the social media boomed, we started to add new information sharing functionalities, which readers can use to post the information in their newsletters directly on their personal profiles, if they want to share that information with friends.

We have to say that information sharing functionalities are not mutually exclusive, more specifically the “recommend” button works just as it used to, in addition to the social media sharing facilities.

Every facility plays its own role

Recommend

Let’s take them one at a time. The recommend button supposes that you can use a form whereby you can recommend the emailed information to one or several friends, by adding their email addresses, a new subject and perhaps even a message. The information will reach recipients in the form of a message from the sender.
Moreover, in a special campaign, the recommend button can be much more complex, campaigns can be organized with special stress on this specific button and people using the recommend button can get prizes.  For example, those who recommend and talk their friends into subscribing to something, stand a good chance to get a prize, or if their friends actually purchased something based on a recommendation, those who made that recommendation may get a discount for a certain product, etc.

In addition to that, as a message typology, those who are recommended can get much more elaborate and complex messages, that can be personalized too, based on name and other data that should be typed in the “recommend” form.  This can be something like “Johnny, your friend Christie thinks you could use the X product”. Of course, you will also need a very good “copy”, something exciting, that should attract them as soon as they see the subject.

This is how you can grow your database, you can see if and how many of the people you recommend have become subscribers, but you can also see whether they have accessed the recommended link.
 

Share on social media

This relatively recent option, meaning the social media sharing button, could virtually be considered a member of the “recommend” family indeed, but it gives your message a wider exposure.  With just one click, your subscribers will recommend the information in the newsletter directly on their personal profiles, and the message will go to dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people on someone’s buddy list.  So you will have the long-sought dream database without virtually any effort.

In this case too, you will be able to identify the people who got the message and, on top of that, you can evaluate the impact that your message has in the social networks where it is posted.  You can monitor the communities where the newsletter is shared, the clicks that every separate post generates, the interaction among social networks, daily reports, monthly reports and even hourly reports, that will tell you which the optimum access times are. And, since segmentation is of the essence, you can also target the email addresses that shared some content in the social media by looking at the profile of those who actually shared something, because this profile relies on demographical data and on a history of their own preferences.

Just as with the “recommend” button, the benefit is that you can expand the database by adding new contacts, if those who accessed the link shared by a subscriber wanted to subscribe themselves too and moreover, to buy something from you.
 

Benefits and disadvantages

Although we can say that both functionalities will help you in the various circumstances that I described above, we can say that basically you have two options, a more “serious one” – the “recommend” button – and a friendlier one – share on Facebook/Twitter, if we were to consider the socializing side.

Nevertheless, statistics say that the “recommend” button will not turn out the rate of response that you would expect.  Very few people will recommend a piece of information they get via email and very few people become subscribers based on a recommendation.

One option will help you expose the email message more, while the other will help you control whatever you’re sending more exactly, and to have a personalized communication. So now the score is even, 1 to 1.

Another feature that could be seen as a disadvantage of the “recommend” button and as a plus for the content sharing is the user-friendliness.  The first involves an effort, meaning the user is supposed to fill in some fields in order to send the message across.  While the second helps users share information by just one click without virtually doing anything. Therefore, the score is 1-2 for the share button.

A recent GetResponse survey (this is an international agency specializing in email marketing solutions), looked at its own customers and concluded that inserting Facebook and Twitter sharing buttons emails will significantly increase the clickthrough rate, more specifically by 30%, than in the case of messages that do not contain such links.
Nearly 74% of the marketers included the Facebook sharing link, and 50% the Twitter sharing link, therefore these two are the most frequently used ones: Twitter - 67.2%, and Facebook - 62.73%.  It looks likes the Twitter sharing button is the most popular and gets nearly 40% worth of clickthrough rates. The clickthrough rate will go even higher if links to several social networks are included.  For example, emails containing sharing options to just one network generated a CTR of 8.70%, while emails containing more sharing links generated 28% more CTR’s and 55% more than the emails having no option to share. So now the score is 1-3 for the social network sharing button.

How do you make them recommend you

Since the efficiency statistics that is associated to “recommend” tell nothing encouraging about it, the only way of stimulating subscribers into recommending something is send them relevant messages, but also some specially-designed campaigns, whereby they do get some sort of reward.
The “recommend” button can go beyond a mere “Recommend” status.  Depending on what you promote, you can rename a button into “Don’t keep it for yourself, tell your friends”; “That training course could be used for you co-worker/partner/friend. Tell them, too.”; “Don’t come alone. Bring along some of your colleagues”. So this is a while ball for the “recommend” button.

And the same goes for the social network sharing button.  If messages are targeted and recipients consider them useful, you only need to take just one step more in order to forward it, more specifically just one click.