HOW TO: Take Advantage of Social Media in Your E-mail Marketing  

Its pretty ironic that this article just came out because we have been talking about it in class. This article is focusing on new ways for marketers to get more people to particular websites. One complaint was that the information wasnt easy enough to share with just the traditional 'forward' button. People wanted to share information in emails through facebook, linked in, and twitter.
A small portion of the article stated:

Just like a piece of Web content can “go viral” as people share it across social networks, your e-mail promotions can get a big boost by making it easy to share them.

A recent study by Marketing Sherpa concluded that simply including sharing buttons to an e-mail marketing campaign led to a “25% boost in reader interaction, and a surge in inbound traffic from social networking sites.” Moreover, huge gains were reported in traffic via social sites: 2,070% from LinkedIn, 1,680% from Twitter, and 1,351% from Facebook.

This, again, reinforces the importance of social media in our society. Suggestions for increasing email marketing include putting a share button to these sites or including a URL that will directly link to the sites. This helps your audience both build and grow, which is the ultimate goal of marketing.