Building an opted in email list is an important goal for your current and future marketing health. Making it easy for your current recipients to share your newsletter in a variety of ways is a methodology you should not overlook.
You probably already have “forward email” at the bottom of your newsletter. But do you have social share and web page version enabled?
I understand that you also want traffic to your website. These points cover both issues.
In some cases, your newsletter may be restricted and you don’t want it shared. In that case, only number 2 may apply to you.
Here are the methods of sharing your newsletter along with links to your website.
The how-to details below are for Mail Chimp and Constant Contact. All of the major email marketing providers provide these solutions.
1. I encourage clients to create blog posts related to their newsletter before they publish their newsletter and link to those from the email. Teaser items work well in sending recipients to your website.
You can publish an entire newsletter on your website but that is not going to bring search traffic to your website.
The blog post articles that you link to from your newsletter allow you to include more and larger visuals as well as a deeper look at a topic of interest or news about your company.
2. Enable social share buttons. This gives you a shortened version of the permalink.
3. You can enable Web Page Version on your newsletter. This serves a double purpose. Some recipients may simply prefer to view your newsletter on the web because of the email interface they are using. But it also gives them a quick way to pull a permalink to your newsletter to share on social.
Note that methods number two and number three are sending viewers to your email marketing provider. However, if you included links to your website within your newsletter they are also getting those.
Social Sharing of Your Email Newsletter
Constant Contact uses a “Social Share Bar.”
Here is the difference between their Social Share Bar which is for your newsletter recipients to share your newsletter and Simple Share which is for YOU to publish your newsletter to social platforms. NOTE that I recommend you share your newsletter related blog posts on your own Social Media. From time to time you can share your entire newsletter just to remind them what they are missing and to subscribe.
Mail Chimp also makes a distinction between sharing your campaign across social yourself and making it easy for your email recipients to share. Mail Chimp creates a shortened eep URL to share.
For recipients to share, Mail Chimp provides an ML merge.
Web Version – Archive Link for Your Email
A Web Version means that you are giving your newsletter recipients an archive permalink to your email to share your entire newsletter on social media. This link is to your email marketing provider but it shares your newsletter along with all of it’s links and a way to subscribe.
Here is Mail Chimp’s instructions on how to name the archive link.
More importantly, Mail Chimp provides a social sharing interface, giving you a short URL for your newsletter.
On Constant Contact, the default message for Webpage Version is “Having trouble viewing this email? Click here”. You can change that. Here’s the details from Constant Contact on how to do that.
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