Study: Two-Thirds of Marketers Integrate Social Media and Email Marketing

With the rise in popularity of social media and its use for marketing, there has been some debate about whether email is dying in the face of social media.  In fact, Ben & Jerry's recently decided to drop email marketing in favor of social media in the UK.  

Just because social media may be a new addition to your marketing mix doesn't mean email marketing should be eliminated.  In fact, social media can help to enhance your email marketing efforts.

Luckily, it looks as though marketers are starting to figure this out. As reported by eMarketer today, in an April 2010 survey by email marketing agency, eROI, two-thirds of US marketers are now integrating social media into their email marketing campaigns.  In addition, email marketing and social media marketing solution provider, StrongMail indicated that the percentage of marketers who had integrated social and email (or planned to this year) is 71% worldwide, based on June 2010 research.

Other Key Research Findings:

• 71% of business executives surveyed worldwide indicated they were promoting their Twitter , Facebook or other social media presence in their email marketing messages (Source: StrongMail research).
  
• 63% of those surveyed said they were enabling email recipients to share email content with their social networks (Source: StrongMail research). In eROI's April research earlier this year, the survey revealed a slightly smaller proportion of US marketers -- 59.1% -- using “share with your network” buttons.
  

• When surveyed about the types of social media tools integrated in email marketing, 91% of marketers incorporating social media into email marketing used Facebook in their campaigns, followed by Twitter at 83.9% and LinkedIn at 48% (Source: eROI research).

Marketers: Use Social Media to Complement Email Marketing

As a marketer, you shouldn't undermine the importance of email marketing -- email is an effective lead generation tool.  If you're still not convinced, read this great guest post we published about why email is so important.

Instead of dropping email for social media, use social media as a way to complement your email marketing efforts.  Without social media, the limit of your email marketing campaigns depends on the size of your email list. When you incorporate social media into your emails , you're essentially expanding the potential reach of your email campaigns beyond that list.  By adding social media, you're enabling email recipients to share and spread your content to people who aren't on your email list.  How great is that?

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