How did you incorporate Sharing Buttons in Email Newsletters?

[Danielle_Wong]

Have you ever incorporated sharing buttons on email newsletter articles? If so, how did you go about doing it? Does Marketo have any tools for this?

Thanks

[SanfordWhiteman]

Depends on what you're trying to share. Do you mean sharing the email content itself?

[Danielle_Wong]

Yes, I want to let our clients share specific articles from our newsletter.

On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 7:54 PM Sanford Whiteman <marketingnation@marketo.com>

[SanfordWhiteman]

That's a tough one with Marketo alone.

Are your articles also standalone web pages? Or do they only exist in the context of the email (and in its web version)? What exactly do you want people to be able to share?

[Danielle_Wong]

My articles link to landing pages. At a minimum, I want customers to be able to share the link to the article.  Ideally, not sure if it's even possible, would be nice to share the title/description in the email along with the link when customers click share.

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

At a minimum, I want customers to be able to share the link to the article. Ideally, not sure if it's even possible, would be nice to share the title/description in the email along with the link when customers click share.

OK, whew, I'm glad you already have these articles somewhere, because extracting articles from email content isn't practical/possible.

It sounds like you just need to know how to construct sharing URLs. The process is different for each social network. The annoyance is going to be that most of the networks publish a JavaScript-based way of constructing "Share This" buttons, which is cool, but will absolutely not work in an email.  As a result you need to reverse-engineer, to a degree, how those buttons end up constructing URLs, then use that same structure in your email. For example, a Twitter button (last time I checked) constructs URLs like

     http​s://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=My%20Status%20%20https%3A%2F%2Fsharemakercdn.figureone.com%2F9d7e71c7-b2aa-4658-9c47-d5b61089ebbb%2F-%2Finline%2Fyes%2FAllegro%20%23MyHashTag

So you'd need to create links like that. I recommend using a Velocity script to emit the links because you'll need to URI-encode stuff (as you can see above). It is possible to create the links by hand, though.

[Danielle_Wong]

Thanks so much Sanford. This is incredibly helpful and I'm going to try this stuff out!!!!