In her post "Making Social & Email Work Together" on the MarketingSherpa blog, Jeanne Jennings shares some interesting stats on email & social:

The strategic link between social and email is supported by “View from the Social Inbox 2010”, released by Merkle last month. It builds on the findings published by MarketingSherpa earlier this year, and by Silverpop in their “Emails Gone Viral: Measuring ‘Share to Social’ Performance” late last year.

Merkle found that people who use social media actually check their email more frequently than those that do not: 42% of social media users check their email four times a day or more, compared to just 27% of those that don’t use social media.

Even better news for marketers: 63% of those surveyed said that they use the same email account for social media messages as they do to opt-in to permission based email.

A recent MarketingSherpa study found that 75% of daily social media users said that email is the best way for companies to communicate with them, compared to 65% of all email users. And 49% of Twitter users said they made an online purchase because of an email, compared to 33% of all email users

The Silverpop study found that social media share links included in email messages were receiving clickthrough rates of 0.5%. It may not sound like much, but it is significantly higher than the clickthrough rates on the “forward this email to a friend” links that marketers have been using for years.