Instagram has gained an additional 100 million monthly users in just 9 months, to reach 400 million. But the benefits of Instagram advertising no longer apply to only ads within the platform. Instead, email marketers are seeing the positive effects of employing social advertising platform creative testing capabilities to increase the success of their emails. In addition, its parent network, Facebook, continues to see amazing user growth. Finally, both Facebook and Twitter have become major video advertising platforms.

If you’re an email marketer, you’re always working to get customers to engage with your content. This is tough, given so many emails are exchanged and often people don’t have the time or interest to open them all. Variables like a compelling subject line, body copy, and especially images, significantly impact the success of your email campaigns. This is good news for email marketers who can partner with Instagram advertisers, because with Instagram you can continually test these and other variable to optimize your campaign to find the best possible ad creative combination. In a recent study, a fitness retailer saw almost seven-times the engagement on-site, within 24 hours of sending editorial-style images in their emails that they first used on Instagram. Not only by testing your ad creative will you optimize your digital campaigns, now you can improve your email metrics at the same time.

It likely does not come as a shock to find that the number of Facebook users has continued to rise. As of Facebook’s most recent update, there are over 1.55 billion people on Facebook monthly. In addition, over 1 billion people visit the platform on a daily basis. That number of daily visitors is more than the number of people who live in Europe and the Middle East combined!  Most recently, Instagram has reached 400 million monthly active users, when as of December 2014, less than a year ago, the platform had 300 million.

Finally, video content continues to explode of Facebook, at over 8 billion views each day up from four billion just seven months ago. For online advertisers, this is a huge opportunity to reach customers.

Facebook isn’t the only platform seeing success with video content. Twitter’s Promoted Videos are highly viewed and an effective way for brands to get user attention. According to Twitter, users who were exposed to Promoted Videos have 28% higher purchase intent. Given 90% of Twitter videos are viewed on mobile, it’s also a way for advertisers to reach users in real-time. In the same report, Twitter provides key tips to creating Promoted Video content.

If you have a person at the start of your video, consumers are twice as likely to opt-in to view the video. In addition, having a clear story to your video can increase purchase intent post-viewing by 9 percent. Also worth noting is the power of entertainment. Creating video content that entertains users and keeps them engaged increases the numbers of opt-in to views by 13 percent, and increase the probability that those viewers share your content by 15 percent. Finally, make sure to communicate how your brand or product adds to a users life. Do this and the familiarity of your brand can increase 5 percent and increase affinity by 14 percent.

To learn more about the power of email and Facebook Advertising, check out our Active Audiences white paper.