Where to focus in the future

Kevin Hillstrom recently polled his readers about what email marketing will look like in 2015. The majority answered "E-Mail evolves in ways we cannot yet forecast." (See poll results.)

Returning after an enforced week away from email -- you may have noticed the lack of posts -- the future of email marketing actually seems very clear to me. And important for understanding where to focus your efforts.

Kevin almost answers his own question in a subsequent post, where he explores what email marketers would do if email cost $0.05 per message to deliver.

He notes that the excellent tactics he describes will never get widespread application because email doesn't cost that much to deliver. There is not enough incentive to get people to work harder at email.

Or perhaps there is? The costs of sending email continue to rise. Not in the form of a delivery fee, but in the form of lost opportunities. Opportunities lost to email marketers through the evolution of email technology and email user habits.

Think of all the challenges now making life difficult for the email sender:

• Image blocking
• Preview panes
• Email fatigue
• Growth of mobile email
• Display inconsistencies among webmail services and email clients
• ...not to mention ever tougher and more sophisticated anti-spam filters

So if the "cost" of email marketing grows, you have two choices. Carry on doing what you do now and see revenues decline. Or adapt.

But how to adapt?

If you think of the mechanics of your emails and email program, there are plenty of things you can do.

Wiser folk than me have long talked about designing for preview panes and blocked images, authentication technologies, building a clean delivery reputation, the benefits of certifying your messages, improving open rates etc. etc. See this big selection of resources, for example.

These are the basics of a future-proof email marketing program. But an equally important perspective is one that gets away from the mechanics and looks at your overall program as a relationship builder.

All the challenges to getting emails read and acted on arise because of one basic principle. People are only willing to pay attention to emails they truly want.

All these challenges appear because services and people seek to...

• protect themselves from unwanted email
• restrict inbox access to those who truly deserve it, and
• make it easy for individuals to determine when and whether they want to read an email or not

So at an even more basic and holistic level, all the email challenges outlined above can be mastered by simply delivering what people want. Embracing the causes of those challenges rather than fighting them.

Then your subscribers solve the challenges for you. By downloading images, opening your email just based on the sender name (not the preview pane), extricating you from the junk folder and not reporting you as spam in the first place.

OK, sending emails that people want is a simple concept. BUT...it has to go beyond that.

If you want people opening your email irrespective of the size of their preview pane, then you need to build a connection that keeps them engaged and looking forward to your emails.

Because once you have the basic technical requirements in place, it's people and their perception of your emails that determine your success.

It's people telling services like Hotmail what is and isn't wanted email. It's people deciding to open your email rather than the emails of all your competitors, even before they know what's in it.

Targeted, relevant emails are an important step in this relationship-building process. But it goes beyond that. It's about all the other aspects of building an ongoing email experience that creates loyalty and ensures attention.

It's about...

• Ensuring your emails are recognized and associated with a reputation for value
• Proving a trusted partner, accepting accountability for your actions and respecting the principles of permission email marketing
• Seeing each email as one in an ongoing series of emotional interactions with subscribers, not a series of one-off messages.
• Being more creative, different, better than the competition. At the moment, you can achieve this simply through basic best practices. But as people and delivery processes get more selective and choosy, and competitors get clued in, it's the creativity that distinguishes you. A topic Tom O'Leary addresses in a recent post on the battle for recipient attention.

That is the email marketing of the future. And those aspects deserve your attention as much as the more conventional elements of a successful email marketing program.

Tags: email marketing

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