If you haven’t integrated social media into your e-mails and vice versa, you’re missing out. Give your subscribers the ability to share email content with their followers, and you stand to potentially grow your mailing list, increase ROI, raise brand awareness, and reach new markets and subscribers.

In fact, a Marketing Sherpa study found that 42% of daily social media users check their email four times a day or more, compared to just 27% of non-social media users.

Going “social” in email can be as easy as adding buttons into your template to invite subscribers to join or “Follow” on social sites.

Sailthru makes it easy to allow subscribers to share content as well. Use the public_share or social_share functions in your campaign with options to “Like” or “Share”.

Public_share posts the entire newsletter, while social_share allows users to post or like a specific article:
<a href=“{ {public_share('fblike')}}”>Like this on Facebook</a>
<a href=“{{social_share('fbshare', 'http://blog.sailthru.com/specific_article/')}}”>Share on Facebook</a>

Or, encourage your readers to forward your newsletter to a friend by including an easy e-mail forward button. Just drop in Sailthru’s zephyr syntax {forward_url} to your campaign, and create a template named “forward”.

Share your campaign on social sites by posting a link to the Web-based version of your e-newsletter. And remember to include {view_url} in your template so readers can click to view it online, too.

Let users sign up for your email list on your Facebook page via a signup box and use Twitter to redirect users to a signup webpage, which can be easily hosted on Sailthru.

Finally, create a Facebook wall post that encourages fans to opt-in to your email list. Consider an email promotion to only your most engaged users to boost their awareness of your Facebook page. Offer incentives such as discounts or advance notice of sales for subscribers who choose to follow your social media page. Offer rewards or discounts for those who opt-in to your campaign via a form on your page or blog.

Remember that quality content is the key to engaging your readers. Readers will be inspired to share content for a few reasons. Incentives such as contest winnings or discounts are motivation. Sharing items of value or significant savings opportunities provide the subscriber with feelings of validation in their social circle. But the most influential reason to post is quality content. Sharing dynamic content helps subscribers feel they are contributing to their social circle and can also integrate them with others. So be creative, relevant, and engaging across all platforms. Social media is based on sharing, not advertising.

Sailthru’s Query Builder tool gives you deeper insight into your lists.  This month, we’ve noticed that some of you have had questions about the following queries.  Feel free to get in touch with us or see our docs for further information about data mining with our Query Builder!

1. Geolocation

To track the location where your users are interacting with your emails, you can create a list or snapshot report by geolocation.  To create a targeted list or be aware of where your users are coming from, you can query a source list to find all users in a specific country, state, or city.  The Query Builder will allow you to search lists by city, state, or country, and even by how often your user is interacting within a certain location.  However, there is a specific way to call this information.  The chart below demonstrates how to format your geographical queries:

For more information on geolocation you can read our documentation at http://docs.sailthru.com/geolocation

2. Random selection size

Some clients are interested in sending to only a part of their list.  If you have a number of emails you want to send, but no other criteria, you could use our random selection size tool within the Query Builder to generate this list.  When you select the “Generate List” under Action within Query Builder, you can choose your source list from the dropdown menu and then type in the number of users you’d like to send to in “Random Selection Size.”  You may want to select “valid” in the criteria section to make sure you’re sending to users that haven’t opted out or hardbounced.

3. Purchases

For our e-commerce clients, we have a feature on the Query Builder tool that allows you to gain more insight into who is buying from your emails.  Within any source list, you can see who has made purchases based on how many items they have purchased, how much money they have spent on any given item, or when they last made a purchase.

The example below demonstrates how to query users from a source list who have purchased at least one item.

Yesterday, I posted my thoughts on this service on Business Insider. Sailthru, as you might have noticed, also sends email. Isn’t Amazon competitive and charging a much lower price? Not really. Sailthru is a full service provider, while Amazon is providing a piece of infrastructure. What’s the difference?

Here’s what both SES and Sailthru do:

1. send emails

Here’s some of what Sailthru does, that SES doesn’t:

1. industry-best deliverability
2. open, click, and purchase tracking
3. list and campaign management
4. userbase analytics (engagement, geo, interest-based, time-of-day, etc)
5. dynamically assembled emails using templates
6. behavioral targeting and segmenting
7. user interface to build and manage all of the above
8. 24-hour support with human beings whenever you have delivery problems or need help

Anyone who considers email an important part of their business is not going to be able to use what Amazon is offering without building significant additional pieces on top of it. At Sailthru, we’re excited about Amazon’s new product and look forward to evaluating and possibly integrating with it.

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Thanks StartupDigest for the nod last week when you included us in your Email Mafia as “The Upstart” -http://thestartupdigest.com/2010/07/28/email-mafia-paypal-mafia-email/.

We like the scrappy nature of the name that conjures up an image of a fighter in the ring with new moves and something to prove. We are that company, and as part of those new moves look for more blog posts, collateral, and market coverage on how our Horizon solution is changing the game of email from quantity to quality.

What isn’t included in this choice piece of media meat is that we are also serious technologists, entrepreneurs, marketeers, and business developers. We have created, bought, sold, marketed, developed strategy for, and implemented some amazing technological solutions. We have also brought on a cadre of experienced technology and media investors to compliment our growth in premium online content, community, and marketplace clients.

What does all this mean for you? First, stay in contact with our blog, newsletter, twitter, or smoke signals to hear what the “The Upstart” does next. Second, we promise to beat any existing contract you have with an email service provider to deliver your mass and transactional emails to your community.

Yep, you read that right. We will provide you an email solution which will match or exceed your current technology at a better price. If we can’t, we’ll post on our blog who beat us and why. We’re that confident.

What’s the catch? Zilch. We know our solution will outperform what you have. We just ask you to speak with us, try it out, and come on board without all the flashy marketing promotions and collateral. As a savvy business person yourself, we suspect you’ll prefer performance, reliability, and reducing that ESP line item much more than a video, animal mascot, or folders of collateral on your shelf.

Now we believe we’ll always compete well with any email provider out there, but we can’t guarantee this forever (our investors might start asking questions). So take a break from your vacation quarter and give us a call to find out more and try out the system. There’s nothing like starting off Q4 with a cost reduction of up to 50% and a performance increase to boot.

Cheers,
The Upstart

Clicking the banner takes donors directly to the Red Cross donation site where they can choose between the Haiti Relief and Development and the International Response Fund.  Including the banner costs nothing but may help to ease the suffering of a people in need.  We hope that you will consider including one of these banners in your outgoing emails and we’d love to hear ideas you have about helping out.

So far twitter has avoided the advertising route, but why not do something like the below? At the bare minimum we’d like them to brand their emails and provide some thing more than just an alert. In this example we’ve included some links to other people my new follower follows.

Twitter follow example email

@twitter  We’d love to help send your email! Call us.

Seriously, come on people!

How many of you spend more than two hours writing and designing your monthly newsletter? A newsletter that will get an open rate of under 20%.

Now how long did you spend writing and designing your reset password email? You know the email, the one people get when they have forgotten their password and haven’t been to your site in a while. The one that gets an open rate close to 100%.

You might want to tell them something about your site, a new feature perhaps or a discount?

I ask you to think differently about your email in future. Spend time where it should be spent, on transactional email then your marketing emails.

Please use the comments below to tell me your most valued transactional email and what you’ve done to make it more powerful to your business.