Social Sharing in Emails

[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.

[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).

[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?

[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.