This is huge! And might I add very validating! I have been an advocate for years, but it has been an up hill battle for me to convince clients that this truly does work.

So yes, email still converts better than social media marketing (or search for that matter), but do you know what really works?

Combining them together. By adding social sharing icons to your email marketing messages you can increase your click-through rate (CTR) by as much as 158 percent.

Yep. Marketers who use social sharing buttons in their email marketing campaigns benefited from a CTR of 6.2 percent, compared to a CTR of just 2.4 percent for those folks who used email alone. LinkedIn buttons worked best of all, ahead of Facebook and Twitter (tied for second place), Google+ and Pinterest.

Amazingly, these numbers are on the rise. Email marketers have noticed this trend, and are taking action – almost one-third (29.4 percent) included social sharing icons within their emails in 2012, and, of those, almost two in five used at least three social networks. This infographic takes a closer look at how social sharing boosts email results.

I know it’s a bit long, but worth taking a look at.