• by Jess Nelson , June 22, 2016

Email marketers should take note of Instagram’s rapid success, because email newsletters drive more frequent purchases when paired with social media according to a recent study by digital marketing company Fluent. 

Instagram announced on Tuesday that the social media photo-sharing site has doubled its monthly users to 500 million within a span of two years, and that the company now totals 300 million daily users. One hundred million Instagram users are located within the United States, but a predominant 80% of users come from outside the U.S.

Instagram’s rapid rise has unseated Twitter, which counts 310 million monthly active users according to the company’s Web site, and SnapChat, which revealed it has 100 million daily users earlier this year. Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, still towers over the fledgling social media network with more than one billion daily active users.

This is good news for email marketers, who can expand their marketing reach by integrating social media into their campaigns. Multichannel engagement makes Americans more likely to make purchases from their favorite retailers, according to a May 2016 survey of 1800 American consumers by Fluent.

Twitter, Instagram and Facebook were the most powerful channels to be combined with email marketing, according to the report.  Online and television advertisements were seen as the least effective when combined with email marketing, per Fluent.

In addition to increased purchases and revenue, email marketing and social media integration can also help marketers with customer acquisition and online engagement. Whereas an email campaign is limited to an email subscriber list, social media offers an opportunity for subscribers to share brand content on their own social media feeds -- increasing the scope of email marketing campaigns.