Marketing Tip: Don’t Forget the Email-ers

One of the ways to make sure that your content is well read is to make it easier for others to disseminate or share your content to others. In the realm of social media optimization, this can refer to the display of buttons, which provide one-click submissions to social websites like Digg, Reddit or Del.icio.us.

Another more traditional way of spreading your content is through the traditional outlet of emails.

The option of emailing a webpage to others is not one that is commonly offered by bloggers, although you’ll see it quite often on online magazines, newspapers or journals.

Most people are likely to be familiar with using emails to share content online, while social websites may generally appeal to more tech or niche orientated audiences.

Do People Really Use the Email Function?

That was the same question on my mind a week ago and I’ve decided to run a quick survey by embedding a poll widget on Dosh Dosh’s sidebar. The poll asked the following question:

Do you actually use the “Email This Post” function to send blog posts to others?

I’ve left the poll widget for a week or so and received 173 votes. There were three options and here are the results of the poll:

• Not at all - 142 votes (82%)
• Once in a while - 18 votes (10%)
• Yes, quite often - 13 votes (8%)

While the poll figures are small, the percentage ratio experienced proportionate growth over time and I imagine that similar figures would be reached if the sample size was larger.

This means that if I had a great article that was read by 1,000 visitors, 180 of them are likely to email it to at least one person, which means that I could have potentially gotten an additional 180 people (or more) viewing the article in question. This figure can be rather sizeable when more people view that one article.

I personally don’t email articles or blog posts to others at all and didn’t expect to find that some people actually do use what I considered to be a superfluous function. This just proves that setting oneself as a model for the average visitor leads to an inaccurate perception of how others use a website.

Going Outside Your Targeted Demographic

Offering emailing options is one of the many ways you can optimize your content by managing reader expectations. As a marketer and site owner, you’ll need to understand that people often have differing levels of technological knowledge and familiarity.

Providing an emailing alternative allows you to reach individuals outside your targeted demographic (forums, other bloggers, social media outlets) and can help to expand your website’s reach.

Setting Up Email Options for Blogs

The easiest way to set up email options for blogs powered by Wordpress is to use the Share This or WP-Email plugins, which will insert ‘email this post’ links at the end of each single blog post page.

Share This includes other social buttons as well but WP-Email offers the ability to add a private remark about the post for the email recipient.

Blogspot blogs already have a built-in email function so if you like to utilize it for your blog, you can turn it out by going into the ‘Settings‘ section of your Dashboard and picking ‘Yes‘ for the Show Email Post links option.

Another Poll about Social Bookmarking Buttons..

I’m currently running another poll concerning social bookmarking buttons so please participate if you can spare a few seconds. The poll should be just to the right of this blog post in the center column.

There will be an update post with the results in about a weeks time so do look out for that if you’re interested.