1) Deliverability – Reputation, not content!

Keeping bounce, unsubscribe and complaint rates low are far more important in getting your email delivered than what content and phrases you use in the message. Nowadays you need to prove your qualities as a sender before ISP’s will deliver your email.

2) Outlook 2007

To the dismay of designers Microsoft have decided to utilise MS Word rather than Internet Explorer to render HTML emails in the latest version of Outlook. This means many emails will now resemble a dogs dinner and require re-coding. As upgrades continue this will become more and more important.

3) Automation

Marketers want to get more relevant and timely with their messages but this takes valuable resources. Therefore it makes sense to automate many tasks including:

4) Relevance

Marketers are finally understanding that the days of ‘load and blast’ email marketing are over. Your customers get bombarded with all sorts of messages everyday so you need to make sure your messages are consistently relevant to get read.

5) List fatigue & Frequency

Leading on from the drive for relevancy this has come as marketers realise their results are bottoming out. The constant bombardment of customers with messages and overuse of lists has caused this. In 2008 marketers need to get more intelligent with the timing, frequency & targeting of messages.

6) Social networking sites

The likes of Facebook are changing how people communicate online with friends. The personal email account is less important as Facebook provides a spam free dedicated inbox for messages only your friends send. There is no other clutter like emails from your bank, someone pushing Viagra or a stackful of special offers disguised as newsletters.

What does this mean for your email marketing? It means that as less personal communication is received in these personal addresses less time is given to them and you have to try much harder. In a way many personal email accounts are now a place to get what the owner thinks of as their “junk”.

7) Death of email list rental

If you listen to an email list broker they will say email open, click and conversion rates are falling. However if you listen to a email marketer focused on CRM and retention they will say the opposite.

The problem is people signing up to 3rd party lists are usually only interested in the incentive of the discount voucher or competition. They could not care less about receiving offers from credit card companies, drinks brands or online gaming sites as they are perfectly capable of finding those when they need them by doing a Google search.

Also the questions list owners tend to ask these people usually have answers to which the person has no idea of the answer to without looking it up. Do you know how much you spent on washing powder last month? Do you know when your home insurance is due for renewal? Probably not which is why their targeting options are worthless.

The only industry which still seems to persist with list rental is the financial services industry where the cost per acquisition per customer just about justifies the use of email lists as a lead source.

8) Optimisation

A growing trend is marketers desire to test their messages to identify which variables such as subject lines, lead offers or timing works best.

Through this they are achieving that extra 1-2% from each email which across the course of the year is adding up to a significant impact on their bottom line.