I was sitting down to re-design my MailChimp Newsletter template to include “social links” and got totally distracted checking out how others do theirs. So I thought I’d at least post some of the screenshots I took, along with my observations:

I thought it was interesting that the Gap has links to Facebook and Twitter, but not Old Navy or Banana Republic (sister companies).

Allposters.com places their social links near some big, giant promotional codes.

Zappos’ CEO has a huge twitter following, but the link to their twitter page was surprisingly hard to find. Yeah, I know there’s a big twitter banner above my mouse icon in that screenshot, but my banner blindness made it invisible.

Interesting how REI includes a link to their YouTube channel.

Even the nerds at Popular Science have social links in their footers, but they’re the only ones I’ve seen who also include reddit.

Most newsletters seemed to put their social links in their footers, so it was refreshing to see Borders putting theirs into the header.

Express clothing tells you it’s specifically their CMO on Twitter. Is this a play on Zappos’ CEO on twitter? Nothing wrong with that. But does Express’ young audience know what a CMO even is?

I love National Geographic, but holy cow their sidebar social links just look like ugly banner ads. Why not stick them in their “official” yellow borders, at least?

Modcloth has some interesting icons I’ve never seen before. I had no idea what the “k” and the “p” link to. Which of course made me click.

In case you care, above is what I came up with for our own newsletter. I chose the simple icons because I was going for a more functional look (i want people to actually click, afterall). The mysterious monkey icon links to the MailChimp Jungle.

Got a good example of your own to show off? Post the campaign archive links below as a comment!

See also: Adding social links with MailChimp Merge Tag