Social Sharing in Emails

[Anonymous]

Is there a way to put the social sharing icons in an email? I know we can do this in an email, but not positive if its possible in an email. If so, can someone share a help article on how to configure this?

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

These links do not have all of the features of the social links for pages, but I made this tool that creates social sharing HTML links that work in emails: http://sharelinkcreator.com/.

[Michael_Sogunro]

Hi Evan,

Thanks for sharing your tool. I really appreciate it.

Our emails include links to various blog posts, events, reports, etc. I want to be able to give my subscribers the opportunity to share the email, not just a link to one blog post, event, or report. With ExactTarget we're able to run reports on how often the share feature is used and we know its used a lot by our subscribers.

How can I include an option for our subscribers to share the entire email?

[Anonymous]

Hi Michael,

This sounds like the Forward to a Friend option might work for you.

It allows the email to be forwarded on in a way that resets the lead information so nothing from the original recipient is passed on (other than in the back end where the leads are connected through that feature), and you can collect new lead information (be aware of CAN SPAM if you reside in Canada or your recipients are likely to forward to anyone in Canada).

By having the Forward to a Friend feature enabled, recipients can share the entire email with others (via email); I don't imagine that anyone would want to share the entire email on social, for example - outside of the lead information sharing, it's not really good form to share in that medium anyways.

Just a thought!

Michelle

[SanfordWhiteman]

Sharing the latest issue of a newsletter isn't good form?

[Anonymous]

You would share it as the newsletter email itself though - not as a post on social for example.

You might share PARTS of the newsletter on social etc, in which case, you might want to use that link generator that Evan created, or even something like Click to Tweet that allows you to choose select pieces of text for readers to share on Twitter.

Hope that clarifies

[SanfordWhiteman]

Also note that you can still gate the email content if you wish (pop up a form if it's not a known lead who follows the share).

Again I feel like if people think your content is compelling enough that they want to post it to all their followers, instead of clicking "Forward to Friend" a million times (it's hard enough to get them to click it once), then let them!  I feel Josh Hill​ agrees with me on this as he's made strong points in the past about looking at the upside of people wanting to share content (barring legal or practical impediments, of course, which I know all too well in my main industry).

[Anonymous]

Not disagreeing with you at all! I've honestly not ever used a newsletter with the intent of sharing the entire thing - if you've created the perfect newsletter with the intention of sharing it in as many places as possible, that's great!

You hadn't mentioned that to start with so assumed you were looking to share a fairly standard newsletter as is, hence my note about the other sharing options.

Agreed that, if you have it all designed to be shared, you shouldn't be stopped from doing so, and it definitely saves you from having to duplicate into a landing page of some sort

[SanfordWhiteman]

You hadn't mentioned that to start with so assumed you were looking to share a fairly standard newsletter as is, hence my note about the other sharing options.

I was responding to Michael's concern: "Our emails include links to various blog posts, events, reports, etc. I want to be able to give my subscribers the opportunity to share the email, not just a link to one blog post, event, or report. With ExactTarget we're able to run reports on how often the share feature is used and we know its used a lot by our subscribers. How can I include an option for our subscribers to share the entire email?"

So it seems clear that he's already made the case for sharing the email, just needs the technology.

[Josh_Hill13]

Yes, I do strongly agree with you Sanford Whiteman​

One of the things I see (and just had a long chat with a client about) is making things more complex than necessary. This is one of those things. Don't overthink the blocking of content, it's not worth the dev time. Worry more about how to get the content out there and making it worth sharing.

When I cite useful content in my book, I usually use the gate page because I think that's the honorable thing to do. I'd rather share the direct PDF link though, but how much would that "harm" the creator?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Well... I guess we disagree.  If you have a beautiful HTML newsletter that is suitable -- shaved of all private and/or irrelevant data -- for viewing as a web page, and it is designed to be syndicated to the public, then only allowing people to share links within the email (links whose content they may not have even viewed!) seems like shooting yourself in the foot.

That's why, as Michael Sogunro points out, MailChimp offers an archive link for every campaign. Other providers targeted toward "newsletters" do so as well.  Obviously this is far from suitable for many Marketo campaigns, which reach far outside the realm of newsletters.  But for other Marketo sends, it's the perfect fit, IMO, and saves you building a redundant LP to present the same data.

[Anonymous]

Hi Michael -

I have tried and tried to figure out how to do that, but haven't succeeded yet.  The only way I can think to do it is by using the "View as web page" link. However, that URL is email-specific and dynamically generated by a token, and I cannot get it to work when it's within the Share code.  Using {{system.viewAsWebpageLink}} as the URL creates a working Share link, but the URL generated does not contain the email-specific portion - the Share URL is only your Marketo domain URL.  In other words, instead of "http://info.mycompany.com/index.php/email/emailWebview?mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRojvq3IZKXonjHpfsX56O4pW..." which would take you to the web version of your email, only "http://info.mycompany.com" shows up.

I'm still hammering away at it, so if I ever come up with a solution, I'll let you know!

[SanfordWhiteman]

I have tried and tried to figure out how to do that, but haven't succeeded yet.  The only way I can think to do it is by using the "View as web page" link. However, that URL is email-specific

... and lead-specific!  I'd say you're lucky you didn't get this to work.  The possibility of data leakage is huge. I think even a mild customization like "Dear Evan" is not something I'd want in the shared page.

It would, in theory, be possible to delimit parts of the email you don't want to be public (think class="per-lead"). Then build a service that strips that content out on the fly, attempting to revert to a template-like view.  But if you have the dev skills for that, it'd probably be easier to build something that straight-up reads the template content via Marketo API.

[Anonymous]

Wow, Sanford - I am lucky indeed I never succeeded in getting this to work. I can't believe I didn't think of the URL being lead-specific.  Thank you so much for pointing it out!

[SanfordWhiteman]

I have a solution. Oh man, do I have a solution.  DM me and I'll show you a demo of the mighty ​ShareMaker.

[Anonymous]

Hi Evan,

This is a really great tool - I've overcome my issue with the Facebook link but still find that the LinkedIn one is not including/sharing the URL. What do you intend the LinkedIn Source information to be? Perhaps I am missing a piece that is vital to that link showing up in the share post.

Currently it looks like this from your tool:

http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.visier.com%2Flp%2Fforrester-tei-...

[Anonymous]

Please disregard, it's a strange function, or lack thereof, in the share window that pops up - I tested the share and it worked!

Thanks for this tool - MUCH better than trying to manually update these URLs

[Anonymous]

Hi Michelle -

I'm glad you found my tool helpful.  It was born of my sheer frustration at trying to update the share URLs manually!  I completely agree the share functionality in emails should be baked into Marketo, but this works in the interim even though it requires a good bit of extra work.

[Anonymous]

This is typically not done in an email, usually what I see people do is have a link to the social page you want to share and they can share from there.

I think the reason is that the share buttons are coded with javascript which will be blocked by ISP's in an email due to spam

[Michael_Sogunro]

Thanks for the reply, Jamie.

We have a blog and post several blog posts a day. We have daily and weekly email products so it wouldn't be ideal for me to manually change the link for each social share icon for each blog post in each email being delivered.

As a new Marketo user, I'm surprised this is not already part of the system.

Thanks again for the response. I need to come up with a solution before moving over our email products into Marketo because the share icons are used heavily by our subscribers.

[Alok_Ramsisaria · Accepted solution]

Hi Marketo provides this functionality for landing pages only and there is no such way we can use social sharing buttons in an email. But there is an alternative. Your designer can create a social icon image also he can fetch from the web, add it inside an email, hyperlink it to the account/page you want to promote. Hope this helps!