Email marketing messages with a social sharing option generate 30% higher click through rates than emails without these features. So says a new survey by Get Response - as well as anecdotal evidence that the rules governing email and social media communication are increasingly becoming blurred.

The study, "Email Marketing and Social Media Integration Report" also found that 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 Top Movie Referral Site

The findings illustrate the clear trend of consumers using social media to recommend services, products and advice to each other.  Twitter, for example, has become the top referral site for movies, leaving such sites as Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Bing far behind in terms of average monthly growth in number of streams referred and average minutes of video watched per stream.

Other statistics, provided by StrongMail, show that allowing consumers to take content and offers and embed it into blogs and websites generates a 20% conversion rate - which is nearly 7 times as effective as Facebook, at 3%, and ten times better than Twitter's conversion metric of 0.35%.

At the same time, Share-to-Social' or 'Share-to-Network' tools are coming into their own.  Exact Target, for example, has rolled out a suite called Social Forward that allows marketers to incorporate the icon of a social network such as Facebook, Twitter or MySpace in an email. Subscribers can then click the icon and share the contents of the message with their online networks.

Silverpop is another company that also introduced new functionality.

In addition to helping information spread, these tools also can track the progress campaigns as they travel virally through Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn. Silverpop's Share-to-Social feature, for example, tracks which social network the recipient posted the message on and which achieved the best results. Marketers can tell that an email was opened 1,000 times after being posted on Facebook and only 100 times after being posted on MySpace.

Other Findings:

The GetReponse survey also found that:

• 60% of all social emails included only one sharing icon.

• Only 11.2% of social emails included 3 icons or more.

• Twitter was the most popular social sharing option, included in 67.2% of all social emails; Facebook came in a close second at 62.7%.

• Emails shared on Twitter returned CTRs of 10.20% over 40% higher than messages not linked to any social media.

• Almost 19% of SMB marketers used the Twitter integration feature at least once. Only 13.5% included social sharing options.

• SMB marketers used Twitter social media integration twice as often as social sharing links.

The study analyzed social media integration and sharing using Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Digg in almost 500 million emails sent by 19,149 GetResponse customers.