As a brand, you’ve no doubt established your social media presence and broadcast your content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. After all, this is the social media strategy that receives the majority of attention in discussions about customer relationship building.

But the conversation is shifting, and its email-bound. Email marketing is the strong partner for your social media strategy, and when combined, social media occurring inside email will lead to the ultimate brand-consumer interaction.

Businesses that use email marketing and social media achieve 28% higher email open rates, according to a VerticalResponse finding earlier this year. In addition, industries that use both tactics and enjoy the highest open rates include music (32%), consumer electronics (31%), financial services (22%), film (21%) and graphic design (21%).

Take these findings one step further, and we find that communication becomes even more engaging when social interaction is actually fully accessible from within emails.

Recently, Tom Edwards at iMedia Connection outlined 5 types of socially-enabled email. Here’s a quick rundown:

1. Social chicklet: At the most basic level, social media inside email is as simple as presenting links to your brand pages in the header or footer of your email.
2. Social call out: Layer this on to #1 by adding a text call to action, such as ‘Send to a friend’ or ‘Follow us!’
3. Socially-enabled content: Here, social goes deeper – directly into the message body, where you offer individual opportunities to share, tweet or like portions of your email’s content.
4. Socially-centric communication: Your entire communication can actually highlight your social media presence by promoting its added value, like exclusive deals or content. The email serves as a gateway to the social media channel, steering recipients towards active participation on your brand’s social platform.
5. Socially relevant: This is where we get very excited about the extraordinary social possibilities. Leverage open graph data to create highly targeted, relevant, and more personalized recommendations to your customers.

Activating your email campaign with ActiveMail will allow you to take social functionality to new heights – right inside the email. Your user base will be able to perform full social sharing activities (share, like, tweet, comment) without ever leaving their email, and you will be able to pull dynamic, real-time open graph elements into the email, driving and deepening your engagement.