What is your obsession with social icons in email footers?
By Ian Reeves, Managing Director at Flourish
Should buttons in email have square corners or rounded edges? How many CTAs is too many, Is the text to image ratio right?
If you’re anything like me you’ll have obsessed over every tiny element of the emails you create, and the impact they have on click through rates. At Flourish we send over a billion emails a year on behalf of our clients and, through rigorous and continuous AB testing have gained a wealth of knowledge on the impact of some of these changes.
There’s one thing however that I’ve never seen on an email testing plan. And it really bugs me… social media icons in email footers. They just sit there, included because they’ve always been there.
Now, I can hear you screaming “if it’s that important to you, test them”. I’m in complete agreement, but you see here’s the thing, clients don’t want to test the effect on click throughs of removing social icons! It’s like they’re so much a part of the accepted brand furniture, that even questioning their presence is heretical.
So why is everyone so into social icons in email footers? Reviewing guidance from some of the email industry’s most well-known and well-respected publishers and you discover:
“Social media buttons allow you to move your subscribers from one platform to another—enhancing their relationship with your business. These are especially important if social media is an important marketing channel for you.”
“Why limit yourself to email messages? These days, brands need to cross-pollinate over various platforms to keep their customers engaged. Make it easy for your customers to find you on different platforms with social media buttons or social media links conveniently placed at the end of the email.”
Blog: Better email footers
Now I’ve got huge amounts of respect for Litmus and Email on Acid, but it’s pieces like this that perpetuate the idea that social icons in footers is ‘the norm’. We’ve all been doing it for so long we no longer question it.
However, the bottom of an email is a prime area for clickable content, on average we tend to see more clicks at the top and bottom of an email than in the centre. The heat map below is a good example (which is based on a real client email, but anonymised to protect their identity).
Looking at one of our client’s emails over a 6 month period we can see that the % of opens that result in a social icon click in the footer was 0.4%. Is a 0.4% click a good enough reason to still include social icons in the footer?
I think this demonstrates that with the maturity of social, the cross-pollination of users between email and social platforms is no longer a thing. With the death of cookies and the increased importance of first/zero party data I would argue that it’s time to break away from the norm and remove social icons from the footer of an email. Instead let’s give the user an opportunity to answer a question related to the email so that we understand more about them or include an additional CTA.
Links in email should drive recipients where you want them to go or provide relevant additional information. Consider this. If you really want your audience to visit your socials, you’d surely make that the focus of your email? Or at least make it part of the email content?
I’m aware that I think about email a lot. But this is something that no one else seems to be talking about and it’s been bugging me for a while now. So, come on email marketing community. Who’s going to join me in my campaign to remove social icons from the footer of emails? Give it a go in your next campaign. If you’re feeling in a sharing mood let me know what you are going to use the space for instead, and the results?
To chat about all things email, and CRM get in touch today. Email: [email protected].
