(hubze) Get Response, an e-mail marketing company, has recently released a study titled “E-mail Marketing + Social Media.  When 1+1 Equals More Than 2,” which showed that Twitter helps extend your e-mail marketing efforts.

E-mail marketing has traditionally been a very tedious process wherein you are limited to the number of e-mails your subscribers list.  More than those e-mail addresses in your list, there is no way that your e-mails could be read by other people.  And then came the time when e-mail marketers asked their recipients to forward the e-mail to a friend, which came with some success in extending the life of their e-mails.

With the advent of social media, it seems that your e-mails now have the potential to be seen by more people.  How?  With social sharing buttons, of course!

As per the Get Response study, a little more than 18% of e-mail marketers now use social sharing buttons within their e-mails.

Twitter Helps Increase Your Click-Through Rate

Get Response also found that those who sent out e-mails without any social sharing button had an average of 2.6% click-through rate for their e-mails.  If the marketer sent out the e-mail with a share-on-Twitter link, the click-through rate almost doubles to 5.0%.

The click-through rate, a ratio of the number of clicks an ad receives and the number of times it is shown, is a measure of success for any online advertising effort.

So if you want to double your e-mail marketing success, harness the power of Twitter.

You do not even have to take a look at your CTR to know this.  Just imagine that you have 100 highly targeted e-mail recipients in your list.  According to an April 2011 report by hubspot, an average Twitter user has around 27 followers.  We think it is higher.  So if all your 100 recipients have a Twitter account, that means that your e-mail has the potential to be read by more than 2,500 people, not just the original 100 that you have.

And Twitter Users ARE Sharing

Get Response also found out that for every 10,000 e-mails being opened, 7 Twitter users share the e-mail to their followers.

Sharing Also Succeeds on Facebook and LinkedIn

The good news is that your recipients do not only share on Twitter, but they also use Facebook and LinkedIn.  In fact, they have seen more click-throughs on both social networking sites.  An e-mail that has a Facebook sharing button included in its body has an average click-through rate of 5.4%, while a LinkedIn sharing button more than triples the CTR with an average of 9.6%.

Take note that Facebook actually has a higher average click-through rate than Twitter, but considering that the average Facebook user has around 200 to 400 friends, compared to the 27 followers on Twitter, it’s actually relatively low.  Also, it could easily be seen as spamming, wherein a lot of people who are presented your e-mail are not interested in your product, service or company.

LinkedIn is also interesting because it pulls in a lot of click-throughs.  It could be because LinkedIn is for B2B and professionals.  Which means that connections there are more defined.  If you send an e-mail targeted at an SEO professional, for example, it would be highly likely that he or she is connected to other SEO professionals on LinkedIn.