4 ways to socialise your prospect’s inbox

The average business user will send and receive a massive 115 emails per day in 2012. Stand out from the crowded inboxes of your prospects by creating and utilising truly compelling content which socialises your prospect’s inbox.

Email is still the most pervasive communication tool; replacing the telephone within many businesses and departments. Many professionals live in their inboxes; this includes your boss, your colleagues, your customers and your prospects. There are many ways to bring a social experience to a prospect’s inbox, such as the following:

Connect on social networks

The first and potentially most obvious is to include social media profile links in your outgoing emails. Prospects need to know that there are multiple ways to connect to your company and the repetition of seeing Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube icons in the email sidebar will help. It has been shown that it is not enough to show just the logo; adding the words ‘Follow us on Twitter’ acts as a call to action to really engage the reader. It also helps to set expectations and let prospects know what to expect from each platform. This is why it is important to treat each platform individually and to develop a strategy which is unique to each.

Share on social networks

When prospects receive a compelling offer their initial inclination is not to share this with their network. To help encourage the process of sharing then make it as easy as possible for your readers. If the offer is to watch a webinar, make sure that the webinar includes ‘Share’ buttons to share with their networks. Although they might not want to share such a resource with their competitors, they would certainly want to gain the karma of sharing something of value with their networks. Consider asking them to share the content to ‘help others out’ or ‘spread the knowledge’ to inspire them.

Create social content

Another way to make user’s inboxes more social is to create more ‘social friendly’ content. People are more likely to share videos and infographics which are immediately engaging, than a wordy article or price list. Be creative and keep the content interesting, using images and other digital formats. Before you send an email to your subscribers consider whether you would want to share this content yourself? If not, it may be worth looking at more interesting formats.

Share with the community

Find a social sharing forum such as Benchmark Email Marketing Community or a social bookmarking site such as Digg, where you can upload your emails and newsletters for others to share. Your email will be available to anyone who visits that community, even if they come to it randomly, which means that just by joining you have expanded your audience. Plus, your emails will be stored in HTML format and will be sure to look their best.

Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Digg are powerful tools that can help expand your audience exponentially, as long as you use them correctly and have a firm strategy in place. Remember to make it easy for your subscribers to share, and to keep your content creative so that you will see your engagement levels and sales go up!