During the holidays, my inbox is flooded with lots of emails from vendors whose products and services I’m interested in, and from some that I am not. Being a procrastinator, I must confess I still have not yet completed my holiday shopping so unlike most, I open a good portion of these emails looking for deals.

Recently, I received an email from a gourmet food vendor who’s meats and wine selection I absolutely adore. The email informed me that they were having an open house and there would be lots of opportunity for tasting and sampling. I immediately though, “yum! Can’t wait!”

The creative on the email included the various icons for social sharing: Facebook, Twitter, etc, Given that a) I like the vendor’s store and b) wanted to share the news with my friends, I tried to click on an icon. Nothing happened. Ok, being the determined one, I figured it may not work from within the email itself, so I clicked on the text to view the content of the email within my browser. Clicked on the Facebook icon. Nothing.

So what happened next? I gave up.

And that’s what most of your customers and prospects would do.

The moral of the story? If you’re going to spend the time and money on email marketing to your customer base and include social features, test, test, test. Make sure the recipient of your emails can actually take the implied action. Otherwise, they’ll never tell their friends about your offer… no matter how good it is.