• by Ben Frederick  @mp_benfred, November 4, 2015

Email and social are growing closer together, and mobile is helping to bridge that gap.

Recent moves by social media behemoths like Facebook and Twitter are allowing email marketers to combine the stalwart revenue/conversions of email with the reach of social media.

Nearly every email campaign has social share buttons, though often in a rather perfunctory way. More and more businesses are using services like Facebook and MailChimp to repurpose email campaigns for social media posts.

But it looks like the integration between the two may grow deeper than buttons and cards as the two channels begin to share data.

For example, Facebook’s lead generation ads that auto-populate form fields when users click on the ads. The ads allow Facebook access to even more deterministic data that some businesses may consider proprietary, in exchange for hopefully extending the reach and relevancy of that businesses ads.

The ads are also geared towards mobile users, whose “fat thumbs” make filling out forms on a small screen a pain. By auto-populating the fields known about the user and allowing them to edit, the ads create some degree of agency for the users as well.

Whatever misgivings marketers and businesses may have about a social strategy that shares lead data, “it’s so effective that you can’t not participate,” says Bob Sybydlo, email service provider Yesmail’s director of market intelligence and deliverability.

And for many businesses, the trade off is worth it for the potential reach that social brings. “It’s a little bit subjective,” says Sybydlo, “I don’t think businesses are looking at that closely enough. How do you really know how much business your FB ad has brought in?”

Sybydlo says he definitely thinks it’s worth it: “A business could quickly disagree with me because they don’t see the same conversion rates from the ads.”