Return On Subscriber – Email Marketing Blog

Two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visit social networking or blogging sites, accounting for almost 10% of all internet time, according to a new Nielsen report “Global Faces and Networked Places. From December ‘07 through December ‘08, Facebook added almost twice as many 50-64 year old visitors (+13.6 million) than it has added under 18 year old visitors (+7.3 million), according to the report.  What does this mean for Email Marketing? If two-thirds of your list is on Facebook, you need to give them tools in your email campaigns to share content so you can leverage the growing audience and gain more visibility for your content – and potentially more subscribers and conversions. (This is being referred to now as SWYN (Share with your Network), which is the worst acronym possibly ever.) Let’s take a look at how you can start to integrate Facebook into your campaigns.

Share Links from Email to Facebook

For your content to be shared on Facebook, you need to use the “Share” url they have created.  By using this, it will create a preview of the content, which can then be posted to a profile or sent as a direct message.

Copy and paste the following line of code into your email and replace <url> with the link you want to Share.

http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=<url>

Here is an example of the process from the Thrillist, an über-hip daily email.  Here is the social toolbar from the email, located below the content.

By clicking on the, you are directed to this page at Facebook, which creates a preview with optional image selections from the page URL provided, which in this case is the link to the post on the site, which is identical to the content from the email.

Once posted to a profile, the user’s wall is updated, as seen below. This is not only shown on the users’ profile page, but also shows up in the news feed of friends. Now you are leveraging that users entire friend list, with potential to move virally from there as people comment, like or share the item. This will create additional presence in the News Feed, Facebook’s killer feature.

Facebook Pages – Ask Subscribers to “Become a Fan”

Promoting your Facebook Page in email brings us to an interesting aspect of Facebook which slightly blurs the line between Email Marketing and Social Networking messaging. When someone visits your page and clicks on the “Become a Fan” link, they are essentially opting-in to Facebook’s version of Email Marketing, which Facebook has branded as “Updates”.

When a user logs in to Facebook, they will be notified of “Updates” and directed to the Facebook Inbox.

Here, you can see an update from Wine Library TV in my update box.  Facebook does give the user ability to opt-out of these updates or report them as spam.  Frequency best practices from Email Marketing apply here as well – don’t over communicate. But what about tracking? Here’s a tip, shorten your URL using Idek.net.  This service allows you to get basic click metrics from your link. If you send a link to your newsletter as a Facebook update, you can use the same Twitter email marketing technique I posted about previously, to get a full sense of activity within the email.

Have any other tips or examples?

Comment below and we will get them posted. Happy Facebooking!