How can you use social media to drive people to email?

@Benjamin - certainly, people don't read all the email they receive, just like any other medium, social network updates included. If an email marketer does a smashing job on their email program, the percentage of those who do read the email will be very high.

Specific to the question, social media is great for "broadcast" messaging, but you can't have a true 1:1 experience through social media tools. Having a great social strategy makes it easier to get people to sign up to your email program, and many brands and marketers include a "subscribe" feature directly on their social network (i.e. facebook), or can request readers to visit the site and subscribe for personalized content via a social network update (i.e. twitter).

Getting people to migrate from social to email is going to be different for different marketers. Certainly, Pepsi has both successful social and email programs, but how they engage consumers, or cross-promote media to consumers, will be different than a Ford or a Barnes and Noble.

Regardless of the methods used, the ultimate goal is to keep a subscriber engaged across all media that they participate in.

As far as a drive to email, I'd include an email signup on Facebook (very easy to do) and also include some social sharing links/Like features within email campaigns. It's very easy to do as well. I did a presentation on this recently. Here are the slides:

http://slidesha.re/h9Kpml

- Josh Nason
@JoshNason | @DynInc