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Benefits of Social Media and Email Marketing

Social media, including social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as well as online video sites (YouTube), blogs and social bookmarking sites, have exploded in recent years. The emergence of social media has transformed the way people communicate online, and particularly how companies market their products and services to their target audience.

Social media isn’t a threat to email marketing; it’s a tool that complements email because it provides additional channels for sharing information and engaging readers. By integrating social media and email marketing, you can strengthen the reach and viral marketing potential of your campaigns.

Why Marketers Integrate Email and Social Media

Businesses use social media in their email marketing campaigns for a number of different reasons. Since social media has the capacity to reach a large audience very quickly, this provides an opportunity for a company to share content, increase their online following and enhance their brand credibility.

A recent survey shows that 71% of business executives worldwide use email marketing to promote their presence on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. Meanwhile, 63% integrate the two strategies to enable email subscribers to share email content with their social networks.

User engagement is also noted as an objective of social media and email marketing with 35% of respondents integrating user-generated content/reviews into email marketing campaigns.

Social Media Shown to Improve Email Results

Statistics also show that marketers who integrate social media with email marketing see improvements in their results from a social media standpoint as well in their email campaigns. According to an article by eMarketer (“What Are the Benefits of Email-Social Media Integration?” released in November 2010), 34% of respondents rated social media as the online marketing channel with the greatest positive effective when integrated with email, compared to 29% who said web analytics and only 3% who said mobile marketing.


Within the same article, it states that more than half of email and online marketers (53%) said that combining social media marketing with email marketing generated either significantly better or somewhat better results. Most of the remaining respondents either saw neutral results or did not use social media with their email marketing. Only 6% of respondents said that social media had no change in results.

It is evident that marketers who have integrated social media into their email marketing programs have seen improved campaign results and will likely continue with this integrated approach.