How Can We Make Email Marketing Richer?

Internet advertising remains a singular bright spot in the nation's battered economy. Despite a large retraction in tradtional ad spending, ZenithOptimedia reported that $56 billion will have been invested in online channels in 2009, 10% more than last year. But while CMOs embrace the latest fads and Twitter themselves into oblivion, email remains a poorly funded afterthought, attracting a paltry $1.2 billion this year, according to Forrester Research.

So what can be done to get email marketing a bigger share of the pie? We recently sat down with three industry leaders to get their take on what the future holds for email marketers in a rapidly evolving marketplace...

Tapping into the Multichannel Consumer

Tighter integration with other channels and more advanced customer analytics are key to attracting more advertising dollars to email says Albert Lee, product consultant at Responsys. "We need to look at email as being part of the bigger web shopping experience. This can only be acheived if data can be shared across all channels and we can act on this data in a timely manner." (Note that Lee previously worked on the client-side as head of email marketing for ticket marketplace StubHub).

"Providing marketers with a single platform to aggregate their data and transform it into personalized, actionable communications will continue to drive our efforts," echoes Chip House, vice president of industry and relationship marketing for ExactTarget, which earlier this week announced the industry's first on-demand integration with Pivotal Veracity's MailboxIQ.

Staying Relevant in the Facebook Age

Email marketers are also looking for ways to tap into consumers' growing use of smartphones and social networking sites. Lee says that "social networking's advantage as being a channel that's interactive and on-the-go are things we admire."

An ExactTarget study released earlier this year found that integrating social media with email marketing efforts will have been a major growth area for this year, with a 3-fold increase in the number of marketing executives who said they planned to do so relative to 2008. House further points out that he has seen a surge in the number of marketers incorporating text and voice messaging into their email campaigns: Mobile capture, or allowing consumers to subscribe to email via mobie devices, will have grown by a dramatic 500% in 2009 -- more than any other list growth tactic -- according to his firm's 2009 List Growth Survey.

Focus on the Fundamentals

Capitalizing on emerging trends and technologies are important aspects of email marketing success, but too many marketers waste time and resources "chasing the new, shiny object before really addressing program fundamentals," warns Merkle's VP of Interactive Services, Rich Fleck. "For most companies, more attention on core aspects of their email programs will yield higher returns."

With basic problems like deliverability still rampant, he's right. A recent study by Pivotal Veracity showed that 20% of retailers' opt-in email was blocked or sent to spam folders this past summer, a number that has pretty much held steady over the past 6 years, and will cost marketers more than $144 million in 2014, according to Forrester Research.

"If you ask email marketers whether it's important for their emails to reach the inbox, all of them will say yes," says Lee. "As such, it's only natural that deliverability tools and services should be integrated into the ESP's solution."

At the end of the day, marketers' investment in email will be driven by the ability to effectively organize, analyze and act upon customer data to optimize relevancy. According to Fleck, "the biggest drivers of email program effectiveness will be investments in data management infrastructure and customer analytics that inform email program sophistication."

- Jordan Cohen, Sr. Director, Marketing and PR for Pivotal Veracity