Although results vary depending on the type of business and the main consumer demographic, email marketing can still be a very important part of broader digital marketing campaigns. In fact, some research shows that 41 percent of people in the industry consider email marketing to be their most effective tool, outpacing the conversion rate of both traditional advertising and social media.

Furthermore, the number of clicks generated by an email marketing campaign can be increased by up to 78 percent if that campaign features user-generated content. This goes to show that while social media has still not claimed the unequivocal top spot in the hierarchy of digital marketing, it is continuing to demonstrate its value as a complement to various other forms of advertising.

Speaking more generally, the potential role of user-generated content speaks to the ever-growing need for integrated marketing strategies. Email marketing should encourage consumers to click through to a commercial website; that website should encourage people to remain engaged with the brand on social media; and that long-term engagement should elicit user-generated content that can be channeled back into email marketing, among other things.

Perhaps this sounds simple enough, but it can easily become a source of confusion and lost opportunity if the campaign in question is not carefully managed. In the first place, it can be difficult to foster meaningful, long-term engagement with consumers via social media. But even after a company accomplishes that, there remains the whole additional challenge of collecting and compartmentalizing user-generated content so that it can be used at the appropriate times, and to the utmost effectiveness.

There are content curation tools and social media management tools to help with this, and real-time analytics can help a company or its digital marketing partners to better understand what sorts of content will be received by which sets of users, under which circumstances. In the long-run, this sort of detailed examination of one’s campaign can even lead to the further refinement of email lists, so that companies can tailor multiple email marketing campaigns to distinct groups of consumers.

If this sounds complicated, it probably should – especially if you are already busy running a company and you’ve taken it upon yourself to do the marketing on your own, through multiple vectors. While you might have expected that the emergence of user-generated content would make a marketing campaign easier over time, it’s more likely to be a sign of growing complexity in that campaign, and a growing list of things for marketers to keep track of.

To make the most of email marketing and all related strategies, you’ll ultimately have to keep a running catalog of positive consumer feedback and be able to cross-reference it with data about click-through rates, user demographics, and situational influences on consumer behavior. While it’s theoretically possible for anyone to do all of this on their own, they’re almost certain to be better off entrusting professional marketers with all that curation and distribution of user-generated content, so the business owner can simply focus on running the business.