A distinct minority of small-to-mid-sized-business (SMB) marketers use social media links or icons in their promotional emails, according to a recent study from email marketing technology firm GetResponse.

The report, "Email Marketing and Social Media Integration Report" also found that email marketing messages with a social sharing option generate 30% higher click through rates than emails without these features. Also, messages with three or more sharing options generated 55% higher CTRs and emails with a Twitter sharing option returned over 40% higher CTRs than messages without any social media links.Twitter Links Beat Social Sharing Icons

The results also show that 18.7% of SMB marketers linked promotional emails to messages on their Twitter accounts. Another 13.5% included clickable sharing links to social media networks, MarketingCharts reports.

More Emails with Twitter Links Sent

SMB marketers who do integrate their promotional emails with social media send an average of eight monthly emails containing a link to their Twitter account. In contrast, the same subgroup of SMB marketers only sends an average of 3.5 monthly emails containing a social sharing link.

LinkedIn Users Send Most Emails

SMB email marketers that chose to include the LinkedIn icon also sent messages with social sharing options the most, averaging almost six per month. Messages with Twitter came in as the next most frequently sent social sharing option.

However, Twitter and Facebook were by far the most frequently included links in social emails sent by GetResponse users. Almost seven of every 10 social emails included the Twitter icon, and more than six of every 10 social emails included links to Facebook. MySpace and LinkedIn were the next most frequently included links. Digg came in at last place with only one of every 100 social emails.

Most Individual Users Choose Facebook

While Twitter is included in slightly more GetResponse user social emails than Facebook, Facebook is clearly the preferred choice of most individual users. Almost 74% included this social network at least once in their newsletters and campaigns. Only half of marketers included Twitter. The network chosen least often was Digg – with only 1.3% of email marketers including it in their messages.

Average Social Email Contains 1.6 Icons

The average number of social network icons included in GetResponse social email messages was 1.65, with:

• 60% of social emails linked to one network.

• 26% of social emails linked to two networks.

• 8% linked to three networks.

• 6% linked to four or five networks.

About the Data: The GetResponse "Email Marketing and Social Media Integration Report" was conducted from March 23 to May 12, 2010. The study examined almost 500 million email messages sent by 19,149 GetResponse users.