You’ve probably heard by now that Google announced the roll out of social search last week, sleekly dubbed ‘Search Plus Your Word’.

In case you are unsure about what it does in practice and wondering if it has anything to do with email marketing; here we’ll brush over the basic concept behind the feature and what to expect from it.

While 'Search Plus Your Word' will mainly be impacting SEO, it’s important to understand what it is and how it should be affecting the email marketing business.

To begin with, 'Search Plus Your Word' is (at least at this point) an optional feature. Every user has a choice to switch between global search as it is now and the new Google + search.

If they do opt for Google+ search, the short version is that Google search results are going to be personalized for each user. Signals will be drawn from your Google+ Circles, highlighting things your friends, followers, or you have shared.

Google will also be feeding your brand’s Google+ social content directly into personalized results, for consumers who’ve added you to their circles. These search results may also include content that a consumer’s friends posted about you.

So Google’s approach of delivering relevant results based on unbiased data will now be colored by your social sharing activities. Any of these personalized matches will appear alongside ‘normal’ search results, meaning that whatever the people connected to you online are saying or sharing will be counted as more relevant than before.

What it means for Email Marketing:

One interesting byproduct from Search Plus Your World is that email marketing program will become more important, because of its power to encourage actions such as social shares.

Google+ content will be dominant on Google searches, and so, some sites will receive extra prominence because they have an audience containing a mass of social media enthusiasts who share their content; be it newsletters, blogs or other communications.

The sites that don’t have an active social media audience or community will be losing some limelight, so now is the time to integrate social media with your email marketing and actively work do build your social fan base, if you have not already done so.

Integrating Email and Social

The real benefit of social media has always been its ability to leverage your message and amplify your content as people take your content and spread it on their networks.

With 'Search Plus Your Word', if you integrate your social media marketing with your email campaigns, you will not only increase your marketing effectiveness, but you will also be boosting your Google search rank.

You can do this by:

1. Placing a link to your email newsletters on your G+ pages every time you perform a send
2. Including social media share options for G+ in your email newsletters
3. Adding social media channel subscribe buttons on your email newsletter such as “Join our Circle” on Google Plus
4. Promoting your content by broadcasting your blog entries via your Circles on G+
5. Sending out email newsletters that have excerpts from your blog with links to each post

Social share has been a groundbreaking feature of GraphicMail’s 2011 developments, making us the first email marketing service to incorporate the ability to easily share email marketing messages on social networking sites and report on the results.

Our clients benefit from being able to see how many times an email newsletter has been shared on social networks, viewed and clicked.

The mashing up of email and social strategies is something that GraphicMail is committed to continue with in 2012 by further integrating social media and our product features.

We will discuss this further at a later stage, so keep reading our blogs to stay up to date with the latest news on social-email integration.