Latest Trends in Email Marketing

Perhaps the most interesting current trend in email marketing is something that’s not happening: companies are not looking at email holistically, as part of an overall communications strategy to their customers. Multiple departments in a company may well be sending email to a given customer, but there’s no one managing the communications from a customer’s point of view.

“The word strategic is not there,” observed Paul Beck, Senior Partner and Executive Director of Interactive Marketing and Advertising at OgilvyInteractive, Worldwide.

A large part of the reason for this is undoubtedly reflected in the data presented by Stefan Tornquist, Director of Research for MarketingSherpa. He shared data from a recent Sherpa survey showing that people who are responsible for email marketing are typically responsible for a lot of other stuff, too: 71.1% handle overall marketing communications, 64.7% have Web site oversight, 57.4% handle online advertising and 55.6% oversee Web design. Even at the low end of the survey results there’s interesting data: Fully one-fifth of e-mail marketing is handled by non-marketers (for example, human resources or financial department personnel).

An important trend for all is the move toward standardization, which is the focus of work being done by the Email Experience Council, a coalition that’s working to bring standards to such issues as: How do we all refer to an email bounce in a way that guarantees we’re all talking about the same thing at the same time? (It also has succeeded in standardizing the spelling of “email” itself.)

Of course, no email session is worth its salt without a few practical tips and tactical bits of info, so here you go:

After your third email (and its doesn’t matter whether you’re sending three a week or three a month), your response rate will diminish by 60 percent . . . In the world of HTML email, the top left corner is the Boardwalk of your real estate . . . Use HTML creatively with respect to fonts and color, but try to avoid placing graphics in the top portion of your HTML email: Potentially 40% of your list is using an email client that blocks images, and that number is likely to increase given what’s happening with the Yahoo! and Microsoft clients.

Oh, and subject line is crucial. But you knew that already, didn’t you? Of course you did.