Over the past several months, many industry voices are surmising that social media messaging could one day replace e-mail. While that might seem far-fetched, recent research* from e-mail marketing company GetResponse shows that social networking and e-mail are most definitely cross-pollinating.

The study, "Email Marketing and Social Media Integration Report," shows that e-mail marketing messages with a social sharing option generate 30 percent higher click-through rates than e-mail without those features. What's more, when three or more sharing options are offered, the click-through rate is 55 percent higher, and a Twitter sharing option resulted in 40 percent higher click-through rates -- than those messages without sharing features.

Other findings of the study:

• 60% of all social e-mails included just one sharing icon.
  
  
• Only 11.2% of social e-mails included three icons or more.
  
  
• Twitter was the most popular social sharing option, included in 67.2% of all social e-mails. Facebook came in second at 62.7%.
  
  
• E-mails shared on Twitter resulted in CTRs of 10.2% -- over 40% higher than messages not linked to any social media.
  
  
• Nearly 19% of SMB marketers used the Twitter integration feature at least once. Just 13.5% included social sharing options.
  
  
• SMB marketers used Twitter social media integration twice as much as social sharing links.

*GetResponse analyzed data from approximately 500 million e-mails sent by 19,149 GetResponse users.

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