Since Microsoft decided to set Email Marketing back a few years by using Word's rendering engine , I see a fitting simple yet unorthodox kick in the hiney to them is in order.
Every January email marketing pundits try to make predictions of what the industry will bring for the upcoming year. They range from the career conservative to off-the-wall reckless. Some self-serving predictions blur the line between editorial and advertising so much that only a New Year's hangover can help you tell the difference between the two. Even though the accuracy of annual email marketing conjectures can be debated, almost all have some sort of truth to them. With that being said, below are my four bold predictions for 2009 prefaced by the fact that I have a short-term 50% accuracy rate and an 80% long-term rate. So I'm usually right, eventually.
The price per email for the middle and enterprise marketplaces will drop.
This hit my RSS today...looks good for us for some time to come:
Marketers facing the current weakened economy remain unclear about what this year and beyond will bring, according to the Direct Marketing Association's first-ever "Future of Direct Marketing" qualitative report, released Monday. Nevertheless, a common theme of the report is that technology will become increasingly essential to success. Consisting of interviews with direct marketing leaders and a compilation of their views on a variety of factors affecting the industry, the report found:
•Consumerism increasingly will drive legislation and self-regulation in the direct marketing arena.
•The customer will gain more control of choices and transactions, especially concerning marketing communications. Marketers should ask customers their preferences about what marketing messages they want to receive, how often they wish to receive them and through what channels.
•Multichannel marketing driven by Web. 2.0 technologies will become increasingly important, including capturing and capitalizing on data acquired through digital channels.
•The movement away from single-channel campaigns will continue, with more integrated multichannel strategies being implemented. The report, available for download at DMA's online bookstore via www.the-dma.org, is priced at $135 for DMA members and $240 for nonmembers.
The forward-to-a-Friend gimmick is a failed attempt by e-mail service providers to incorporate viral marketing tools into their applications. Because 100% of the most commonly used e-mail clients have a forward e-mail feature, people use that instead. The only thing we e-mail service providers can do to save face is to hope that the feature reminds people to use their forward button.
