IM your ESP to offer SWYN, ASAP
An interesting development for Network Centric Marketers has developed from Charm City – Blue Sky Factory of Baltimore, Maryland has developed a “Share With Your Network’ (SWYN) feature for their email customers which allows email recipients to easily post email content onto their social networks.
SWYN capability is integrated into Publicaster, Blue Sky Factory’s email offering to marketers. By adding a simple code snippet, marketers can now give subscribers an option to share an email with friends on popular social media networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, and MySpace.
This makes a lot of sense – Think about it. People rely on people they know for affirmation regarding purchasing decisions and when they share the content of an email that is about a particular product or service, , it is a basic endorsement from a trusted source. There’s a great potential for viral marketing as word spreads.
But the real value to network centric marketers is the ability to gather metrics. Now marketers have a window to see how many times a message is shared, clicked upon and viewed, and in what social networks the sharing occurred. This type of capability can help a marketer determine other influencers in a network.
Here are a few things to consider when looking at SWYN:
- Do your customers have a proclivity to use social networks?
- If you are already using social links on your site, is there any traction there? If so, you should definitely try SWYN in an upcoming email campaign.
- Remember, an email will be shared only if it is open and read; make sure you are adopting best practices regarding copy, creative, and timing.
- Conduct A/B testing and see what characteristics of your emails lead to more sharing on social networks.
Only a few Email Service Providers (ESPs) thus far have rolled out SWYN solutions for their customers – Silverpop, Yesmail, Lyris and ExactTarget. It is a bit surprising, given the explosion of social networking, that other ESPs haven’t already done so. The Marketing Consigliere recommends you seriously consider switching to an ESP that provides SWYN capabilities if your ESP can’t tell you when they will have that function available for you.