By Debra Aho Williamson

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few weeks looking at data on how consumers and marketers use e-mail and social media. Last week, I published a report covering the ways that marketers can maximize the connection between the two channels.

One thing that’s clear is that marketers are very focused on linking their existing e-mail marketing with their emerging social media strategies. In a survey published by Econsultancy and Adestra, 37% of e-mail marketers (mostly UK-based, but some from other regions) said they already encourage people to share content on social networks, and another 31% said they are planning to.

This sort of linkage is the low-hanging fruit; it’s relatively easy to add badges or tags to e-mail newsletters encouraging people to share with a friend or to become a fan or follower. Over time, we will see a lot more sophisticated integration of the two disciplines, as well as more segmentation. Marketers will segment not only their e-mail database (something 80% of survey respondents already said they did) but also their social media database, to better understand how (or if) the two audiences overlap. The next step will be to customize communications to each audience group.

That is what marketers need to work toward; without a total understanding of their audience across e-mail AND social media, they are leaving a lot left to chance. I discussed this and other strategies for linking e-mail marketing and social media marketing in a Webinar presented by StrongMail last week. If you missed it, you can view the entire Webinar here. If you only want to see the slides, they’re below.