Presenters at ad:tech New York discussed the synergy of social media and email, citing the benefits of personalizing each send through multiple segmentation dimensions for maximum relevancy and resulting engagement.

Email marketing, traditionally a numbers game of open rates and measured clicks, is evolving thanks to the influence of social media and other relatively new online marketing channels.

At ad:tech NY, Robyn Peterson, senior vice president of product at Mashable, explained that the key to the company’s success with its recently launched email marketing effort is a proprietary interests graph of its subscribers that allows them to tailor emails to each recipient. The results have been favorable, with Mashable garnering 20 percent consistent newsletter growth month-over-month.

The engine behind this personalization is granular topic selection by users, leading to hyper-relevant emails and excellent overall metrics; Mashable recognizes more than 10 percent click-through rates per email send, according to Peterson. Additionally, he mentioned that more than 20 percent of all email clicks were social actions, creating a halo effect and expanding Mashable’s reach exponentially with each share. Peterson explained further that the impetus behind this setup was the company’s effort to answer the fundamental question of, “What kind of emails do [users] want to see?”

Peterson’s fellow presenter Luke Glasner, principal at Red Pill Email, highlighted an eMarketer article in his talk, outlining the social-email multiplier effect with some useful data: 90 percent of all social users check their email at least once per day and demonstrate two to three times as much engagement with marketing messages (compared to non-social recipients.)

Glasner advised that in order to achieve the heightened engagement from social users, building an accurate “digital profile” of each subscriber is crucial. This profile represents the variety of channels each person uses to interact with a brand, including email, specific social networks and newsletters. The profile allows for deeper segmentation of lists and, combined with personalized, unique email content, ensures maximum engagement and social multiplication by the receiving audience.