Silverpop today announced its new Share-to-Social feature, making it the first email service provider to bridge the gap between email marketing and social networking.

Silverpop’s new Share-to-Social feature allows marketers to quickly turn emails into socially-enabled viral messages. With a click, marketers can place links within an email allowing recipients to easily post the message to their profile page on Facebook or MySpace, where friends can see the message, make comments and even post the email on their own profile pages.

“Silverpop’s new Share-to-Social feature gives marketers the ability to easily tap into the power of social networks,” said Bill Nussey, CEO of Silverpop. “It unlocks a whole new range of possibilities for viral marketing that can make a brand’s messages more effective and more targeted than ever before.”

Now available in limited release, Silverpop’s Share-to-Social email feature has already found eager audiences, ranging from new Moms to people interested in sharing family-friendly videos.

“Social networks are all about communication,” said Matt Lindenberg, assistant director of marketing for Diapers.com. “The Share-to-Social feature empowers our customers to communicate with each other, and therefore allows our messages to move beyond our email list. One of our emails was posted on 50 different social network profile pages. That kind of customer endorsement turns our email ‘push’ marketing into a powerful ‘pull’ campaign.”

Share-to-Social can energize existing email marketing programs, turning them into a powerful acquisition tool capable of increasing list size and filling email databases with highly-qualified recipients who share the same interests as a brand’s most engaged email recipients. And Silverpop’s enhanced reporting capabilities enable marketers to identify which of their email messages have gone viral, allowing them to track message activity at a granular level and target future messages based on that information.

Silverpop’s Share-to-Social feature tracks which social network the recipient posted the message on, telling marketers which one achieved the best results. Silverpop creates a unique tracking code for every shared message, so marketers can tell, for example, that an email posted by a recipient on Facebook was opened 1,000 times while one posted on MySpace was only opened 100 times.

Marketers can even measure the ‘fan out’ effect of friends sharing with friends. If one recipient shares an email on a social site and it was opened 10 times, marketers can track that. But they can also measure the number of opens and clicks achieved when the original email recipient’s friends post the message on their profile pages. Such sought-after influencers are easily identified and targeted. Lists of social influencers can be created in Silverpop’s solution with one click by simply viewing the “recipients who forwarded” list.

“Tracking like this enables marketers to identify their most influential brand loyalists,” Nussey said. “Companies can target those individuals with special offers and content that rewards them for their efforts and encourages continued brand ambassadorship.”

Another company now using Silverpop’s new Share-to-Social feature is GodTube, a global technology company that creates social networking tools for the faith-based and family marketplace. It achieved significant viral activity from its social email marketing campaign. The email had an open-to-click rate of 31 percent, and nearly 15 percent of those who clicked in the email posted the message to Facebook or MySpace. Astoundingly, 25 percent of the posted emails generated additional clicks, compared to MarketingSherpa’s estimated average clickthrough rate of just 2.5 percent for BtoC marketers using third-party lists.

“If you’re going to use viral marketing as a tactic, Silverpop’s social marketing tools provide an excellent opportunity to reach people with your organization’s marketing message,” said Tom Patterson, director of email marketing for GodTube. “If just one person picks up an email and posts it on a social site, then it becomes a realistic possibility for your message to become viral.”