Actually, we’re not supposed to be here anymore. According to various media sources, email marketing got killed off by...well, by just about everything.

In 2006, it was blogs and RSS feeds. Then it was mobile marketing. Then along came Web 2.0 and "user generated content". Then social media really got going and Facebook and MySpace were the usurpers. In 2009? Twitter, of course.

It seems no new marketing channel can call itself credible until it gets the "email killer" tag.

And yet email marketing continues to grow in scale, scope and recognition:

• Data collected for the DMA benchmarking surveys¹ shows ESPs sending record volumes of email,
• …the latest client email marketing survey² has almost nine in ten marketers claiming email is strategically "important" or "very important" to their business,
• …and we even find new evidence³ that increased consumer participation in social media actually leads to greater use of the email medium this social media was supposed to kill.

Clearly there’s plenty of life in email.

This longevity has three foundations.

The first is email marketing’s core benefits. It's a data-driven, targeted channel that drives action and builds relationships by reaching people at the ubiquitous heart of the online experience: the inbox.

The second is the continuing innovation in the industry, which brings forth a constant stream of new tools and techniques to boost results while providing greater value to recipients.

The third is email's ability to integrate successfully with other channels. Social networks, blogs and similar are not, in fact, competitors, but can work with email within a holistic online marketing strategy.

But it's not all rosy in the email garden.

Unique CTR for retention email was around 11% when Infobox first got going. It was 12.6% at the start of 2009 (the last UK figures recorded). Not a giant improvement for all that innovation and effort.

Before we ask how that can be, let’s see first what's changed in the last three years…

The trite answer is just about everything. But for me, there are three key developments: deliverability, new tactics and design challenges.

Deliverability

Getting emails delivered to inboxes remains the biggest concern for most email marketers. That hasn't changed. But how ISPs and other inbox providers manage incoming email has.

In 2006, an email's content probably played the biggest role in determining whether that email made it through spam filters. Today, inbox delivery success - especially in the B2C world – depends greatly on the reputation of the email's source.

This sender reputation is largely tied to the physical source (IP address) of an email, but the future will see it associated with a sender's domain.

The growing role for sender reputation and the slow shift to domain-based reputation is part of a broader move toward more accountability in the email world. A complementary development is the rise of email authentication.

Back in 2006, authentication was a concept limited to technical circles as various standards sought to get established. Today, authentication - the ability to verify the alleged identity of an email’s sender - is a must, with DomainKeys Identified Mail becoming the main industry standard.

Accountability is the watchword for the future. Authentication combined with reputation data allows ISPs and others to better judge a sender’s email. The actual content will count for less and less. Instead, such reputation metrics as spam complaints, bounce rates, and recipient interaction with emails will drive delivery success.

Design challenges

The end of 2006 saw the arrival of Outlook 2007 and its idiosyncratic approach to rendering HTML emails. Image blocking and preview panes also spread to cover pretty much every major client and webmail interface out there.

These developments raised the awareness that not every email display environment responds identically to the HTML and CSS used in email. They focused attention on design issues like never before and forced marketers to look closer at the recipient’s overall email experience.

A second design challenge arose from the growth in mobile email use.

The poster child for mobile email in late 2006 was the Blackberry. Given its poor handling of HTML email, the potential growth of mobile email was seen by many as a real problem for email design.

Many of us quietly hoped that those reading their email on a mobile device would simply save it for the home or office PC.

Three years on and mobile email has gone from strength to strength. But fortunately for us, so has the ability of mobile devices to properly display HTML email.

Apple proved the designer’s saviour, with the iPhone's UK release at the end of 2007: its HTML email capabilities shamed competitors into improving their own email rendering features.

Not that we’re safe from the mobile email challenge. Today’s smartphones may handle HTML email better and come with impressive web browsers installed, but they are far from perfect.

We are only just beginning to explore how mobile email changes how people use, view and perceive email, and how that impacts what we send and when.

New tactics

The whole history of email marketing has been a gradual transition away from the "batch and blast” approach to trying to ensure each email is as targeted to the recipient as possible.

This process has always been driven by a desire for better responses. But now we also have the delivery aspect. If recipients don’t interact with an email or if they mark it as spam because it’s no longer useful to them, then this hurts the sender's reputation and delivery success.

So expect this transition to gather pace.

In 2006, better targeting meant segmenting your list into smaller groups. Today, email marketers can turn to more refined techniques, where the timing and/or content of each individual email (or sequence of emails) can be based on the intended recipient's past behaviour.

This might be an email offering bestseller suggestions for a product category the recipient just browsed at the website. Or a newsletter whose timing is staggered so each subscriber gets the message at a time when they’ve been observed to open emails in the past.

This last year has also seen the return of video email, an experiment first abandoned well before 2006. Video .gifs, for example, now allow video-like animations to display in the body of the email itself (albeit without sound).

Another email element to experience a revival is the forward-to-a-friend link, which has morphed into “share with your network” or SWYN.

Marketers are now building "share this" functionality into their emails, allowing recipients to spread email content through social networks (like Facebook), social news sites (like Digg) and microblogging platforms (like Twitter).

Given all these new targeting, content and viral marketing tools, we might expect the response to marketing emails to climb steadily. Yet as we saw earlier, this isn't the case. Why?

There is, of course, increasing competition for attention, both in the inbox and outside. Some also lay the blame at the feet of marketers themselves…for not making appropriate use of the expertise, experience, tools and tactics available to them.

The real blame, though, lies with one problem that has not changed since Infobox first appeared. Most marketers are aware they should be using better tactics in their email efforts, but are unable to do so due to organisational and financial constraints.

Mark Brownlow
Email Marketing Reports

1 Published benchmark reports are available here.
2 Published client email marketing reports are available here.
3 See here.