Social e-mail marketing, simply said the mutual strengthening and cross-fertilization of e-mail marketing and social media marketing, focuses strongly on tools to share your email content and on ways of creating content that people find worth sharing.

Besides share-worthy and thus valuable content, you also need sharing tools to enable recipients of your e-mails to share the content via their social networks. Of course this does not mean that you have to fill your e-mails with a tsunami of buttons that link to every possible social network now. In e-mail marketing less is often more and the KISS principle rules, especially if you think deliverability.

There are various solutions and tools to enable recipients to share your e-mail content but before you start implementing them there are some questions you should ask yourself.

First of all: think about your target audience. What social networks do they use? Ask them. And when you know, focus on these social media.

Don’t just start adding sharing tools to your e-mails if you have never done it before. You want to explain and announce it to your recipients and explain them what all these little buttons or icons are about.

If your target audience is young, trendy and connected not too much issues there. But what if you send emails to top-level executives that are somewhere between 45 and 60 years old? Maybe you will even find out they don’t want to share at all!

One of the most importance issues is to learn what motivates your audience to share and creating e-mail content that corresponds with these motivations.

Finally, think about where you want your ‘sharing’ options to appear in your e-mail. As is always the case in e-mail marketing, the answer here is testing, testing and testing.

Using social sharing tools is one of the easiest and first steps in combining two channels. There are more opportunities that we will tackle on this blog. But before you start: make sure that you understand the dynamics of your target groups and both media.