Ask the Expert: Mark Brownlow, author of Email Marketing Reports (Part 1 of 3)

We recently had the pleasure of interviewing Mark Brownlow, writer, editor and owner of "Email Marketing Reports," to pick his brain and tap into his unique perspective on the industry. Having written more than 3,000 articles and posts on email marketing topics since launching his highly popular site in 2001, Mark has seen a lot over the years, and—needless to say—has been a prolific contributor to the marketplace of ideas.

In part 1 of our interview, we asked Mark to describe how email marketing has changed over the years, and to share his most memorable moments from the past decade.

PV: How is email marketing different today than when you started Email Marketing Reports back in 2001?

MB:The basic concepts behind email marketing remain the same. Successful newsletters around 2001 were based on permission, relevance, value, timeliness, professionalism and personality. Sounds pretty familiar, right?

I say newsletters, because back then there was a lot of focus on informational newsletters sent by independent, "netpreneurial" web sites. As the web evolved and online business matured, the conversation refocused on promotional (retail) email. I often think retailers and others would benefit from borrowing a few concepts from the relationship-oriented content approach of the lowly email newsletter.

While the attributes of a winning email remain unchanged, the resources available to produce them have grown enormously. Even if we don't always use them. When I first started the site, there were just a few resources out there. Now we have hundreds of specialist blogs, books, forums and events with dozens of new articles appearing each day. The amount of information available is extraordinary.

We also have lots of excellent email service providers and software solutions that weren't around 10 years ago. When I sent out emails in the late 90s, we just assumed they got delivered, read and acted upon. Nobody checked stats because we didn't have any. Now we have a wealth of data at our disposal to evaluate campaign performance and a range of specialist tools to improve it.

Most importantly, email marketing has established itself as a real discipline and industry, with its own specialties (like deliverability).

Unfortunately, one other thing hasn't changed—you can still find plenty of people peddling crappy "opt-in" lists to the uninitiated. Except now they get to call themselves CAN-SPAM compliant.

PV: What were the most memorable (and important) moments of the past decade?

MB:Most people would probably point to technical improvements and some of the changes in the delivery landscape, but my "favorites" are more big picture stuff:

1. Chris Pirillo declares email marketing is dead (February 2005)

Although Chris Pirillo started talking about the death of email earlier in the decade, his keynote at a 2005 blogging event was when the "Technology X killed email" meme really began in earnest (X was RSS in this case).

Although the statement itself proved to be wrong, Chris raised important points and knocked some of the complacency out of the email marketing industry. It led people to think more collectively about the long-term health of email marketing.

The whole "email is dead" thing continues to keep us on our toes.

2. The economic woes of 2008/2009

One of the few upsides to the economic problems of 2008 and 2009 was the image boost it gave email marketing. Suddenly people wanted more accountability, measurability and cost efficiency from their marketing efforts and email fit the profile. It's given the industry much more respect and acceptance, but also more scrutiny. But, like the "email is dead" meme, scrutiny keeps us moving forward.

3. The release of Outlook 2007 (late 2006 / early 2007)

There's a silver lining theme to my answers, but Outlook 2007's unfriendly approach to rendering HTML email was also a blessing in disguise. Much like Pirillo's statements, it had a tremendous impact on awareness. In this case, the realization that actually no, emails don't look the same wherever you view them.

The growth of email design as its own discipline, the importance of design testing and the need to develop real experience in this area got a significant push from Microsoft.

4. The launch of Gmail (April 1, 2004)

Another strange one, perhaps, but Gmail's launch really shook up the free email scene with immense implications for marketers. Until then, free webmail addresses were often low-grade, throwaway accounts, with limited mailbox space (often just a few megabytes) that filled up rapidly. Then Google came along and laid a marker with Gmail, offering 1GB of storage capacity (which was astonishing back then).

This kicked off a feature war that continues today. The likes of Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail now sit behind hundreds of millions of robust consumer and business email accounts. Their evolution demands constant attention from email marketers in terms of deliverability and design.

5. Release of CAN-SPAM (December 16, 2003)

The implementation of a federal law in the USA was a big one. It laid a regulatory framework around email marketing that provided a broad reference point for everyone, taking away the confusion surrounding individual state laws.

At the same time, however, CAN-SPAM gave legitimacy to what many would call bad practices, specifically opt-out. If you accept (as I do) that permission marketing is a key to online success, then it's very unhelpful to have a law that says permission is not required to send commercial email.

People unfamiliar with how email works take their cue from the law, assuming that an email that is legally "not spam" will also be seen as "not spam" by ISPs and recipients. Which we know is not the case.

I understand there are arguments for and against making permission a legal requirement, but email marketing seems to be doing fine outside the US, where pretty much every email law requires an opt-in.

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Make sure to check back tomorrow for Part 2 of our conversation with Mark Brownlow. We’ll get his thoughts on the email marketing industry’s biggest successes and failures.

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