How to bring Social engagement to your emails

In the forever changing environment of email marketing, being left behind can be costly. Everyone know that 2010 was the year of the social movement and I’m sure most of you  have thought about how this can be added to your email campaigns.

There are 3 ways to go about it.

1. Linking

2. Sharing

3. Listing

Social linking is simply adding links to your social communities. Twitter, facebook maybe a linkedin group. It’s a good start, and every can do it simply, but it’s not the only answer.

Social sharing is allowing the user to share the content that interests them to their community. This can be done by adding ‘tweet this’ or  facebook ‘like’ buttons to the email as a whole or allow the user to share sections.

The easiest ways of implementing these buttons is using these non javascript links.

Liking facebook: http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http://www.yourlinkhere.com/&layout=standard&show_faces=true&width=450&action=like

Sharing to facebook: http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://www.yourlinkhere.com

Tweeting: http://twitter.com/share?url=http://www.yourlinkhere.com&text=check this out

Social listing is inserting excerpts from social communities into your email. This creates relevant, interesting email content.
Design suggestions for this would be:

A good example of this being implemented well:

Including social listings creates a fresh, timely and new look. It is a great source of relevant content that displays community angle.
Search twitter, facebook, blogs and youtube for posts that apply to your content, but these shouldn’t be older than 60 days.

You can create your onw as well by asking your auduience to your your #hashtag when tweeting or post to your facebook page or sampling replying to an email. Collect the best and add to the social listings section.

Simple but very engaging.