5 Social E-Mail Trends to Watch

5. New benchmarks measure e-mail social activity.
The study created a set of new measurements specifically for measuring share-to-social activity. Definitions and results for this study include the following:

• Social e-mail click rate. This refers to the additional clicks on shared links per delivered e-mail message. For the study, the social e-mail click rate was 0.5 percent overall, ranging from less than 0.1 percent to 38.7 percent.

• Social e-mail view rate. This refers to how many additional people viewed a message after it was posted on a social network. The study's social e-mail view rate averaged 1 percent, with 3.9 percent for the top 25 percent of performers.
• Social network effectiveness rate. This refers to how well a social network drives additional views. Facebook was far and away the top performer, with an average of 68 percent. This means that, on average, 68 percent of share-link clicks resulted in e-mails being viewed from a post on Facebook. Twitter (5 percent) and MySpace (4.6 percent) were a distant second and third.

Takeaways and best practices
Simply dropping a Facebook or Twitter link into your e-mail messages isn't enough to get your recipients to share them on their social networks. After all, 35 percent of the e-mail messages analyzed for this study generated no clicks on social-sharing links. Social sharing takes effort. To be successful, consider the following best practices: