According to several surveys, email marketing has shown strong growth in 2009 and a high proportion of companies will either increase or maintain their email marketing budgets for 2010.

How will you get the most from your email campaigns this year?

StrongMails Email Breakthrough Report shows a list of trends which email marketers should be looking for in 2010.

The email trends for 2010

1. Dynamic content
2. Concise, simple layout
3. Time sensitive promotions
4. Clear call-to-action
5. Social media integration

You probably already implement the top four trends but it is trend number five I am most interested in. As the use of social media is growing it is wise to combine this with your email marketing. A survey has revealed that 19% of internet users now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves or see updates about others. This is a significant increase of 8%, in previous surveys from April 2009 and December 2008, the figure was just 11%.

Marketers are acting on these results with 75% planning to Increase social media use in 2010, according to a recent survey by virtual events provider Unisfair. So in order to stay at the top or your game you should not choose between email marketing and social media, but instead learn how to use them together.

Some ideas on how email marketing and social media can be integrated:

Blend your email and social media strategies:
Create your overall marketing objectives and identify how email and social media can help accomplish them as a combined effort. Create the content at the same time to ensure different marketing messages are not conflicting.

Don’t repeat yourself:
If you send the same content over and over again then it is understandable that you may have high number of opt outs or un-follows. Keep readers interested with different content on different marketing mediums.

Give email recipients valuable information:
You could use emails to share your best discounts and rewards, while allowing this news to spread virally through social media sites. Or post new product information on social media sites, but product discount information in emails. This will increase sign ups to your emails while spreading your company news on social media sites.

Help others share your news:
Encourage people to share the details of their emails on social media sites. Display links to your social media accounts, allowing email recipients to choose if they wish to receive emails or want to interact with your company through sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.

So what are you waiting for, start thinking of ways you can combine your email marketing with your social media presence. If you do this you should increase the success of your online marketing efforts and 2010 could be a great year.

Gemma