Does social media cannibalize or fortify email? Email marketers have been apprehensively awaiting the answer as social media continue its explosive growth. A new report "Emails Gone Viral: Measuring 'Share-to-Social' Performance, says “social sharing” of emails is becoming a promising trend.

The study, published by email marketing provider Silverpop, found that “social sharing” is already achieving click-through and reach rates several times that of the long use forward-to-a-friend functionality. Without offering incentives, social sharing rates average 0.5 percent while forward-to-a-friend rates are typically only a few tenths of 1 percent.

"Combining email and social networking can be very powerful," said Loren McDonald, vice president of industry relations for Silverpop. "Research tells us that ninety-two percent of adult Internet users send or read email. And social network users are, on average, connected to between 150 and 200 friends, so developing an email that is socially shareworthy can turn messages viral very quickly and reach a new group of customers very similar to the ones you already have. This first benchmark study establishes a baseline for future studies that will examine whether sharing activity changes as the practice spreads from early-adoption to a mainstream marketing practice."

The study also found:

•    Using conservative numbers, a Silverpop model estimated that shared emails evaluated for the study delivered an average increase in reach of 24.3 percent (based on original emails delivered), and this figure is expected to increase exponentially once sharing becomes mainstream. Further, on average, social sharing leads to an additional 1 percent of opens.

•    As with email in the inbox, the majority of opens and clicks of shared emails occurred in the first couple of days following posting on asocial site. On average, the last click on a shared email messages occurs about seven days after the initial share, with activity ranging from 1 to 44 days.

•    While specific creative elements did not seem to factor heavily into an email's shareability, it was uncovered that emails most frequently shared were more likely to feature a brand name or product in the subject line rather than a specific offer.

•    While links to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter were included most often in email messages, Bebo, Delicious and LinkedIn actually had a higher percentage of share link clicks among the networks.

Other elements evaluated in the benchmark study included the impact of the number of links to social networks on sharing activity, which social networks generated the most subsequent shares, the average click through rates of emails on social networks and much more.

"Combining email and social networking can be very powerful," said Loren McDonald, vice president of industry relations for Silverpop. "Research tells us that ninety-two percent of adult Internet users send or read email. And social network users are, on average, connected to between 150 and 200 friends, so developing an email that is socially shareworthy can turn messages viral very quickly and reach a new group of customers very similar to the ones you already have. This first benchmark study establishes a baseline for future studies that will examine whether sharing activity changes as the practice spreads from early-adoption to a mainstream marketing practice."

After launching its groundbreaking Share-to-Social feature less than one year ago, Silverpop now has nearly 400 customers using the feature. To develop the study, Silverpop researchers reviewed 562 email messages distributed by 114 companies to more than 54 million recipients. The company analyzed data from email and social network sharing activity and also evaluated creative variables such as subject line elements, design format and location of social network links.