As email marketers, is is considered good practice to include social share buttons in our email marketing.
But how can we add one, when we cant use any fancy coding language or bells and whistles?
I want to get social with my emails
If your email service provider does not have a social feature, i have found a service which will allow us to go ahead and share our newsletter with the world!
1. Visit http://www.addthis.com/web-button-select
2. Ok, so as you can see – it is now a simple case of selecting ‘email newsletter’ – so the button code is served up to use as email friendly html code.
3. Select the page you wish to share. For an email – this will be a hosted web version of your email – or your landing page if you want to be brash and direct.
4. Select your button and hit ‘get code’. You can chose to sign up for an account and get a neat stat section, showing you how many people loved your email enough to share it!
5. Here is the code you will generate:
<!– AddThis Button BEGIN –>
<a href=”http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&username=xa-4c497c8a5117a9c4&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jaymail.net%2FLANDINGPG&title=” title=”Bookmark and Share” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/v2/lg-share-en.gif” width=”125″ height=”16″ alt=”Bookmark and Share” style=”border:0″/></a>
<!– AddThis Button END –>
Not feeling the stock buttons?
Simply grab the code and change out the orange image source with the URL of any image you fancy. I recommend heading over to iconfinder. (P.S – be sure to host your image on your server, or even flicker/photobucket will do! Also remember to change the width and height or your image will look messed up!)
So why is this useful?
Having your content shared across social networks makes it accessible to thousands of people/prospects for your business.
And when it is this simple, there is no excuse to leave social share out of your next campaign!
Jay Chambers
