I’m here at the Inbox Conference in San Jose where I’ll be moderating three panels. The keynote just kicked off and I’m hoping that people are just having trouble getting up because the Keynote is going on and there are only about 60 people in a room that looks like it can hold 350. Maybe it’s a case of a bridge too far: one conference in the email space too many (although I’m hoping not since not only do I hope someone comes to my sessions but my company is exhibiting as well).

But I think it points to the importance of defining your conference. The Email Insider conference is positioned as the high end networking event for email marketers. The Marketing Sherpa show seems to setting up themselves as the Email 101 and Case Study conference. There is the ClickZ one-day email refreshers. And then the slew of ad:tech and DMA shows.

Inbox started out as the email show for the tech crowd. But last year it started integrating marketing tracks as well. Now they seem to be incorporating word of mouth and other forms of marketing. It is hard to know who this show is aimed at.

I think there is a market for a tech-only show, though. Sometimes you just have to pick you audience and go for it. I’ll hopefully post later about how things are progressing. It looks like I may have some time.

—Bill McCloskey

Best practices have taught us that most people naturally migrate to their name in an email, just to check and see if it is correct. But I never realized how many people pay attention to the salutation of a signature as well. Have you?

This may just be a B2B phenomenon, but check this out. Everyone has a pet peeve in life. Mine is people who sign their emails “BEST.” Best? What does that mean? Best what??? Best wishes? This is the best email I ever sent? You are the best? I bested you? I just don’t get it. In conversations with people about this, there is never a consensus on the “Best” way to sign an email, but there are always a lot of suggestions.

I decided to do something different with my email signature line recently after I saw the movie “Meet the Robinsons.” If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a Disney movie for kids and the moral of the movie is, never give up, always push yourself forward. It was a really cute movie. At the end, there is a great inspirational quote from Walt Disney. After seeing the movie, I decided to use “AF” as my new salutation. (You can email me if you want to know what it stands for).

I have NEVER received so many emails in my life asking me what AF stood for. One person even said, “I spent an hour looking it up online. What does it mean?” I guess I never realized the power of the salutation before.

Wonder if this could play into a good email strategy somewhere?

—Jeanniey Mullen

Every week the EEC adds new content to its Whitepaper Room. Here are the latest additions:

CMO Council: 2007 Marketing Outlook Report
A study designed to identify key trends from 2006 and capture insights and opinions about where and how marketers are focusing their efforts in 2007.

eec Webinar Archive: 10 Seconds to Email Success, May 17, 2007
View all of the slides from this webinar.

Chad White: Reportlet - Mr. Bluelight and Deal-a-Day Emails
Examples and strategies for deal-a-day retail email programs.

Chad White: Reportlet - DomainKeys Adoption to Follow Sender ID Past Tipping Point
A majority of the top online retailers have already adopted Sender ID; DomainKeys adoption is not far behind.

*Have a whitepaper you’d like to contribute? Email it to whitepapers@emailexperience.org.

Is it a birthday or anniversary? Who knows for sure. What I do know is that over the past year, a heck of a lot of people came together to work on making a difference in the email industry and we did it. Speaking for myself, one year ago, most people I spoke to about email thought of it as tactical and one-off. Today, the conversations are more about dialogue and strategic planning.

Credit web 2.0 and the realization of consumer-generated content if you want. I choose to credit the eec community for making this change a reality.

I am looking forward to the next 12 months of innovation, change and growth.

Cheers!

—Jeanniey Mullen

Today’s media landscape is shifting so quickly, the previous revolutionaries are becoming the old guard. Here at Bulldog, we’ve been in a position to observe (and take advantage of) the shifting tides, as traditional media companies come to terms with the impact of online media, and online media companies, in turn, work to define themselves in the face of blogs and social networking.

Prospects are more in control of their experience than ever. And that makes driving a specific call to action such as registering for a lead-generation webinar more and more challenging. Email is still an incredibly strong vehicle for promotion—it’s my go-to for promoting Bulldog’s own lead-generation webinars and that’s not going to change any time soon—but the proliferation of web 2.0 functionality has really changed the mix. The equation isn’t an easy one to figure out. Where does our blog fit in? What about the 7+ million blogs out there in the blogosphere? How can we use LinkedIn to drive people into our pipeline? And perhaps most important of all, How do we apply measurement and benchmarking to this evolving space?

It’s not just an academic discussion. As a marketer, I’m feeling this pain every day.

One terrific benefit of being Bulldog’s field marketing manager (I mean, besides the discount Costco membership) is the ability to translate my own marketing pain directly into field marketing programs that help my fellow marketers address theirs. I’m excited about two webinars in the next few weeks in which social media experts tackle the questions I mentioned above.

With our partner Social Media Today, Bulldog is sponsoring The Art and Science of Forming Successful Online Communities, a panel on building online communities and transferring some of the lessons from the consumer world to B2B marketing. And BtoB Online has a webinar this week, Beyond the Mainstream: Reaching IT Pros Through Social Media, a live presentation that will help IT marketers take advantage of the changing environment.

—Amy Bills

We just sent the follow message to all our clients and I wanted to share the news with the EEC community as well.

—Deirdre Baird

================================================
ALERT: AOL disables images in AOL.com & AIM.com starting today!
================================================
Dear Pivotal Veracity Clients,

Today, May 22, AOL officially introduced and rolled-out a new interface for customers who access their email using AOL.com & AIM.com. In addition to a number of other changes to the interface, AOL has decided to disable images in both of these web-based email clients.

As a reminder, images have always been OFF by default for AOL 9.0 (AOL’s desktop email software) but, prior to today, images were ON by default in AOL.com and AIM.com. The new interfaces for AOL.com and AIM.com now turn images OFF by default exactly like AOL 9.

Turning Images back On
Just like AOL 9.0, images will be turned back ON in AOL.com and AIM.com by any of the following:

the recipient enables the images by clicking the SHOW IMAGES link for THIS MESSAGE or THIS SENDER that appears for each email, OR

the recipient adds the mailer’s from-address to their address book, OR
the mailer’s IP is on AOL’s Enhanced Whitelist.

Be proactive in getting images back on! Encourage your recipients to add your from-address to their address book; if your from-address is in the address book, your images will automatically display. In addition to an explicit add-to-address book campaign, strive to keep your spam complaints and unknown user rates low so you qualify for AOL’s Enhanced Whitelist.

eDesign Optimizer already enhanced to show the new AOL.com and AIM.com rendering
Yup! We have already enhanced eDesign Optimizer to incorporate the new image settings for AOL and AIM and have updated screenshot intelligence accordingly for the new interface.

Sincerely,
Your Pivotal Veracity support team

Every week the EEC adds new content to its Whitepaper Room. Here are the latest additions:

Chad White: Reportlet - Personality Goes a Long Way
Learn how retailers do when it comes to projecting a human face in their emails.

*Have a whitepaper you’d like to contribute? Email it to whitepapers@emailexperience.org.

“Content is no longer king,” Craig Spiezle, director of online safety strategies and technologies at Microsoft, told Email Insider Summit attendees last week. “If you don’t have email authentication, your emails are going to be throttled.”

Spiezle then told the audience about a large flower retailer that used a new domain to send out its Mother’s Day campaign this year, sending millions of emails from a domain with no reputation. “Did we deliver those emails [to our Hotmail users]?” he said. “No we did not.” And now they have a warehouse of wilting flowers, said Spiezle in a matter-of-fact tone that said, It serves them right for what they did.

Deliverability was a big topic at the Summit, which is unfortunate. Content is the rightful king. Content is strategic, while deliverability is simply tactical. A focus on deliverability is a distraction and takes us farther away from C-suite conversations we want to have about email by turning email into an IT discussion.

Spiezle, who presented email authentication as the golden path to deliverability, said that 43% of legitimate email volume is certified by Sender ID, and he later told me that adoption is north of 85% among volumne email marketers and that 9 million domains have been authenticated. And among the major online retailers that I track via RetailEmail.Blogspot, Sender ID adoptin is at 59% while DomainKeys adoption is at 48% (read reportlet on DomainKeys adoption among retailers). So authentication is rapidly approaching the point where if you don’t have it then you’ll be in the minority.

While authentication adoption is growing, some audience members were angry, saying that Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and AOL make permission-based marketers jump through too many hoops, have different standards and don’t allow marketers to transfer their reputation from one IP address or domain to another. Spiezle said that they were working on this last point, saying that “reputation should be portable.”

However, Spiezle and Miles Libbey, office of postmaster at Yahoo Mail, who also spoke at the conference, really had no satisfactory answer for their varying standards. Spiezle said that Microsoft will protect its customers and Yahoo will protect its customers. There’s clearly an opportunity for collaboration to create a single standard that would make it easier for legitimate marketers to send their email and customers to receive it.

At the end of the conference, Bill McCloskey, CEO of Email Data Source, astutely remarked that while everyone claims to be protecting the customer, that’s not what’s really happening. That certainly wasn’t the case in Spiezle’s flower retailer example, said McCloskey, who said that his first thought after hearing the story was that there were a lot of mothers that didn’t get flowers this year.

That’s what’s wrong with the current state of deliverability—it doesn’t always serve the customer’s best interests. Even though these customers opted in and wanted to receive these emails, they were blocked. If the ISPs truly care about their customers, then they’ll work with legitimate marketers to simplify the rules so that their mutual customers can be better served. Then we can get back to talking about content, customer-centricity, user-friendliness and other more strategic issues that can take email to a higher plane.

—Chad White

There’s a disproportionate amount of importance on about 5% of an airplane pilot’s job during a typical flight. For uneventful flights, the pilot spends 95% of the time in the relatively unchallenging activity of keeping the plane in the air. The other 5% of the time is spent during the takeoff and landing. But who wouldn’t argue that this 5% is significantly more important than the other 95%?

Sitting in an airport now, I’m reminded of email’s most important aspects—the subject line (takeoff) and the landing page (aptly named!). Unfortunately, many marketers neglect these elements, spending just a few minutes before hitting SEND to write a quick subject line and doing nothing to customize the landing page.

Unlike airplane flights, email takeoffs and landings should be much more than 5% of the time for each campaign. We regularly see subject line testing revealing a 5% to 30% difference in open rates and response. With that sort of value on the table, there is absolutely no excuse not to take advantage of it, even if you just split the mailing of your house file. For acquisition email, test two subject lines to a portion of the file, then optimize the winner to the rest in order to earn the benefit.

Landing pages can make or break your conversion. In a recent acquisition campaign, the offer focused on a very specific promotion—get the Sunday paper for just $1. The design and copy was very explicit and clear around this offer, but the landing page didn’t mention the $1 offer at all. It said, “Enter your ZIP code to find the best subscription deal in your area.” Huh? Where’s my $1 offer? Not surprisingly, 80% of the visitors to this page abandoned.

With the same offer, some simple changes to the landing page to make it match the offer resulted in a 400% improvement in the conversion rate. That’s an investment I’d make every day!

—Stephanie Miller

I am a huge fan of email marketing and really believe in its strength and ability to deliver a dynamic offer in a quick and to-the-point manner. So I wanted to add a personal case study to show how great a medium email marketing is for companies to produce sales in an immediate nature.

As we hopefully all remembered, this past Sunday was Mother’s Day. It’s a day to say “thank you” not only to the women who put up with our crap and issues for the better part of our initial lives, but also (in my case) to the woman I hope to drop my kids off with for hours at a time so I can play golf or have some alone time with the wife. It’s also a day for me to celebrate my wife, the amazing mother of my two children, so she knows how much I appreciate her (all the time).

But on Wednesday of last week it occurred to me that I had yet to think about buying a single gift for anyone. My mind raced while I was at work—what should I get, when should I get it, where should I get it—and I could feel myself drawing nothing but blanks.

Then suddenly the skies opened and the sun shined down on me as I opened up one of my consumer email accounts. I had at least seven emails waiting for me from companies I had purchased from in the past, all with amazing Mother’s Day offers and ideas for the clueless like myself! This was relevant email times 10! Not only relevant with the offer, but relevant with the timing of that offer—combine those two things together and you truly capitalize on the value of email marketing.

So I opened every single email, clicked on every link I could find, and let the companies walk me through what they were offering. It was like having seven different personal shoppers at my disposal. All the advertisers did a great job of making the Mother’s Day offers front and center to the landing page they took me to. Free two-day shipping was referenced numerous times in numerous places, clearly showing the value and benefit they planned to offer me for making a purchase. Because they took me to a specific page with Mother’s Day offers and specials they did the one thing I think any consumer appreciates—they made the buying experience and searching experience easy.

The moral of this short story is that many of the fundamentals we all read about as it relates to email marketing—relevance, timing, value, clarity, offer—were all spoken to in the messages I received. It really gave me the motivation to take the call to action. So companies are getting it. They’re getting what they need to do and how to use those things to their benefit. This then will grow their sales and continually enable them to build their brand online. I ended up buying four things from two different companies, and the reality is that if I hadn’t received those emails, I wouldn’t have purchased anything from any of them.

Kudos to them!

—Rob Fitzgerald

Sometimes you just want that extra bit of security. You want to own the “real deal.” Depending on who you are, you might seek this out in different ways, such as buying a 4WD, off-road-ready vehicle even though you live in Manhattan, or a having a watch rated to depths of 50 feet, even though you don’t scuba dive. What matters though is that should you want to drive through a muddy mountain pass or scuba with the watch on, you could! Most of us, however, never get to see our fanciest gadgets in action, so we really don’t know if they work!

Thus far, most email reputation systems have been a bit like this, haven’t they? Though they’re rated to provide better deliverability, to qualify for the program you already have to have pretty darn good permission policies and list hygiene practices, and in turn pretty good deliverability.

Last week, the folks at Return Path upgraded their Sender Score Certified system to “go off-road.” Along with the changes at Windows Live Mail (image suppression, increased use of throttling and bulk-foldering for new IP’s, etc.), Sender Score Certified now provides some additional tangible benefits that marketers can see and feel.

Return Path also reported that those qualifying for Sender Score Certified will have their images enabled by “default” at Windows Live Mail/Hotmail and will enjoy more lenient daily throttling limits. Plus, certified senders will also have an “unsubscribe” button enabled by Windows Live Mail/Hotmail, providing the opt-out button that marketers have been yapping about for ages. The ESPC study from earlier this year shows that consumers are likely to use it, too. Per that study, 90% of respondents said they would use such a button “if it existed.” Guess what folks, now it does. Want to reduce your complaints at Microsoft properties? Sender Score Certified is looking like a better way now than ever.

—Chip House

The convergence of online, offline and face to face—it’s happening this week!

For those of us who have been working in email, on the service provider side, for a long time, we know it can often be a challenge to get marketers to agree to integrate email into all of the other channels they are using. Many times, clients want to use email first, and then use a different channel when they run out of names with email addresses.

It’s been proven time and time again, that while email is a very powerful response vehicle, it is also even more powerful when combined with other channels and sent to the same target. This week, at the Email Insider Summit we are doing just that!

Attendees of the summit will have face-to-face interactions with speakers about key email topics. They can also then leave the presentations and pick up a printed whitepaper that extends the discussion of the panel just conducted. And...if two channels aren't enough, these same people can request an "email" of all of the relevant whitepapers and case studies shared at the EEC whitepaper room by choosing all of the content located under this title: "Email Insider Summit - May 2007."

This will be a great validation of the power of combined channels and I am very much looking forward to seeing the impact and results.

—Jeanniey Mullen

My MediaPost article last week on why it’s time to spell “email” without the hyphen created a huge surge of support for our Hyphens Equal Disrespect petition—and also prompted some interesting and amusing counterarguments.

More than 100 people, representing companies both large and small, signed the petition, signaling that they would spell the word sans hyphen in their emails, press releases, whitepapers and other publications. If you’d like to add your name to the list of supporters, just click here, let us know your name and the company you represent, and we’ll add your name (but not your email address) to the petition. As the number of signees grows, the EEC will use this list to convince publishers to change their spelling of the word.

In the article I argued that spelling “email” without the hyphen was not only easier and shorter, but more accurately reflected what email is today by severing its association with old fashioned mail. In response, one commenter accused the anti-hyphen crowd of being lazy—which is a great point. People are totally lazy. They crave shortcuts and simplicity. It’s one of the key drivers—if not THE key driver—behind language evolution. So that’s yet another reason to cast off the hyphen.

Another hyphenista said that without the hyphen “the first syllable begs to be pronounced as a schwa (‘uh-mail’) instead of an accented ‘e.’” The English language is full of rule breakers, silent letters and other quirks that sometimes trip people up, but I can’t say I’ve ever heard anyone mispronounce the word as “uh-mail”—or for that matter “em-ail.” People are already extremely familiar with this sans hyphen spelling (as I’ll prove in a minute).

This same person said: “Thankfully, ‘e-mail’ remains the correct spelling for no less an authority than The Chicago Manual of Style, The Associated Press Stylebook, The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, The American Heritage College Dictionary, and Webster’s New World College Dictionary, among others. It’s also endorsed by such language experts as William Safire, Bill Walsh, John McIntyre and Barbara Wallraff. Shall I go on?” Sure, but it would be totally pointless. Language is not governed by autocratic “authorities” like these. It’s created by the masses. Language evolution is democratic.

Roger Harris, of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society, wrote in to cast his vote for democracy, saying that he supports the principle of common usage. He then decided to hold his own little election, “e-mail” versus “email,” to see which spelling was more common. “Perhaps not coincidentally,” he said, “we have a useful tool to determine such usage: search engines.” The result from Google? Hyphenistas 1.96 billion. Anti-hyphenistas 2.01 billion.

“It seems the tide has turned,” said Harris, "and, in support Chad’s proposition, ‘email’ should become the preferred, and correct, usage.”

I polled Yahoo and MSN today and found even more conclusive support: Yahoo preferred “email” 3.19 billion to 1.95 billion, while MSN preferred “email” 580 million to 170 million.

So there’s already been a silent uprising in support of “email.” Help us make a little noise and convince the “authorities” that hyphens are so 1990s by signing our petition.

—Chad White

There are definitely some things in life and business that should not be repeat events. Things that happen once and only once due to their specific nature and what is generally, and socially, considered to be the right way to do, or not to do, things.

As I write this, a few events that should not be repeated come to mind:
• Marriage
• Tax evasion
• Getting drunk at the annual corporate Christmas party (although it is fun to watch the train wreck as long as it’s someone else)
• Burning the Thanksgiving Day turkey
• Sending a true B2B offer to a general B2C audience
• Forgetting to add the opt-out link to your creative
• Email list rental

Now what really doesn’t belong in this list? If anyone is thinking marriage I’ll include a marriage counseling hotline number later. Seriously, as an online marketer who truly believes in the value and potential of e-marketing, why has it become so common for advertisers to look at email list rental as something they’re going to try once versus a program that they will commit to and work to develop into a short- and long-term strategic component of their media marketing plans?

If you look at the online advertising industry as a whole, you see a cutting-edge marketing medium that most predict will grow at a 30% clip year after year for the foreseeable future. Seems like a great sandbox to play in. In a survey conducted by E-Marketer, 84% of the respondents said using email is their favorite online activity—so there is an audience for these advertisers to target! Email (retention and acquisition) will be one of the top two verticals that will offer advertisers the best opportunity to communicate with potential prospects and current customers.

None of that sounds bad, so what gives? Is it just a general acceptance of what is versus what should be? Is there just not enough people in the marketplace who know how to make email work, and how to make customer acquisition a recurring success story in the advertiser world? It’s probably that and more because email list rental is without question an amazing marketing vehicle for branding, customer acquisition, and re-marketing to further establish a relationship with an on-the-fence prospect.

Think about the rationale of saying you’re going to base the entire future of your email list rental efforts on the results you receive from a one-time singular event. Is that good business sense? If everyone gave up after the first try didn’t work out we’d have never invented the wheel, never discovered fire, never been able to fly, and those things called computers would never have been built!

Committing to the process as a whole—testing subject lines, testing different creative, using dynamic targeting and personalization, transmitting your prospecting messages at different times and days—will all lead you to the end of the rainbow that exists. I have seen it happen, and have made it happen for many advertisers—large and small, big budgets and small budgets. The one thing they had in common was the determination to make it work and stick it out. They took on the attitude that this will not be a one-time event, but a multi-stage process that would ultimately take their business to a new level.

It can be quantifiably proven that the more you reach out to a prospect audience with your message, in an ethical and well thought out process, the better the results become over time. This is not a quick fix strategy—one in which you need to sell 1,000 widgets by Friday so you quickly throw together a marketing piece and blast it out to the cheapest list you can find. No, this is an opportunity to reach a prospect audience in a dynamic way, testing a variety of strategies, and capitalizing on the fact that not just the world itself, but the people of the world are all migrating to the digital environment.

So do become committed to using email list rental, and do create a long-term strategy, so you don’t get left behind by all the other companies who have committed to this marketing vertical a long time ago.

Now for that marriage counseling number…

—Rob Fitzgerald

I’ve written before about the power of raising your hand.

Years ago, I raised my hand and started The Rich Media Sig. It is hard to believe today, but at that time, things like video, Flash, 3D worlds like Second Life were considered non-starters. They didn’t work, they would never be adopted. I raised my hand to say: “Let’s start something to educate folks on the power of these technologies.” And now, nearly 10 years later, rich media is so ubiquitous that the term is an anachronism. It has just become “media.”

Jeanniey also is a hand-raiser. Over a year and a half ago I spoke out at ad:tech about the lack of support email marketing was receiving from the then current trade organizations. Jeanniey raised her hand and started the Email Experience Council. The effects that the Council has had to date and continues to have are no less than astounding. Our industry needs more hand-raisers like Jeanniey and more organizations geared towards moving the industry forward like the EEC. My congratulations to everyone.

—Bill McCloskey

Every week the EEC adds new content to its Whitepaper Room. Here are the latest additions:

AOTA: Fortune 500 Companies Demonstrate Commitment to Online Safety
Fortune 500 companies who are authenticating and those who are not.

eMarketer: Legion of Influencers Use Email
Is the current definition of "influencer" too narrow?

Chad White: What Large Retailers Are Doing Right - and Wrong
A look at how 40 major retailers used send-to-a-friend functionality in their email programs.

*Have a whitepaper you’d like to contribute? Email it to whitepapers@emailexperience.org.

As any good salesperson knows, the best time to engage with a prospect is when they are in market. Dialogue happens and business closes. Email can work the same way—even, in some low-consideration, self-service or low-investment cases, creating a valuable conversation that completely replaces the need for a sales person.

We say "dialogue" but let's face it, it's mostly monologue. A very valuable and targeted monologue, but mostly one way just the same. That's okay if the prospect is truly in market—either self-identified or based on behavior. Many email broadcast vendors and solutions can easily trigger a series of timed email messages along a needs tree, based on prospect behavior. Once I've downloaded your software, requested a whitepaper or abandoned items in the shopping cart, use email to close the deal. The number of emails you need will vary according to your business and prospect knowledge of your brand, but the key is to test for the right timing, cadence and content that will move the majority of prospects along the sales cycle.

Test—that's a key point! Keep testing to keep the material and timing current with market trends and competitive pressures, even seasonality.

Consider the trial software scenario. Technology companies have been using email for years to close from trial to paid subscriber, setting a high bar for success and professionalism in this market. Ideally, the email program would be intelligent, so that when the prospect changes his status, the email program adjusts. Don't keep sending me, "Would you like to try our software" emails after I've already spent five days active in the software. Instead, acknowledge when I've actually opened and used the trial software, when I've provided feedback and especially when I've purchased.

The first key is clear permission. Be sure that the prospects know what to expect and make sure it's easy to get out of the conversation. The other primary keys to success are thinking about both content and cadence. How quickly does a prospect make the decision? Match the email to that. Lots of email bunched up over a few days is rarely the right answer, even if the prospect is highly active. If your email series happens over the course of seven to 10 days or less, be sure that the subject lines are differentiated so that prospects knows there is something valuable in each. Give email a specific purpose and give the prospect some breathing room. Would you take a call from a salesperson every 10 minutes while you are considering? Do you want the sales associate to stand outside the dressing room calling in tips and ideas for color matches? Give the prospect time and be valuable and present, rather than overwhelming.

As with most email marketing, if you don't have the software or technology to do this kind of lifecycle marketing, you can baby step into it and prove the concept. Pull the file of abandoned shoppers or free trial downloaders every week or month and send a series of emails—tracking them closely to watch performance and course correct as needed. If you can't trigger the emails and be intelligent about the file, then err on the side of sending fewer, each with more punch.

Either way, it's critical for prospects to feel like there really is a dialogue. Include feedback mechanisms and actively ask for input (and then act on it). Demonstrate that you've listened. Give prospects options like a telephone number or live chat feature. Even a highly custom email is junk if it's just a one-way broadcast. In any communication, including a monologue, sincerity and relevancy count. Hype is not a dialogue.

—Stephanie Miller

I've been working in the email marketing industry since before outbound email began. For those of you who know me, you know that my first foray with email was on the inbound side, while working at JCPenney. After seeing how people reacted to a new communication channel—how honest they were about their feelings, questions and interests in a specific brand—I was hooked on using email.

Over the years, I have seen email's purpose and usage grow, change and expand along with the market. From supporting inbound messages to driving people to a destination online, to becoming annoying and spam, to creating a two-way dialogue, email has seen many different roles. In each of its reincarnations, a few visionaries have always emerged to help guide the way in which we, as marketers, integrate and use the channel—from Ben Isaacson and Andy Sernovitz, to Jay Stevens and Seth Godin, to David Baker, Bill McCloskey, Matt Blumberg, Dylan Boyd, Chris Baggott and David Daniels. Many email marketing advocates have spoken out to ensure that the channel is being used and valued as appropriately as possible. Seeing its potential power and impact, these leaders have opened doors to new ways of using the channel and new venues in which to introduce email that, in today's world, if you can dream it, it can be done with email.

In honor of those who have opened the door to email's effectiveness and showed us how to harness its power, the eec is proud to launch our blog, "The Voice of Email," as a venue for 2007's most passionate advocates to share their thoughts with you.

Read it, tag it, share it, post back to it. Whatever you do, interact with it, for it is only through your involvement and interest that email will continue to develop into an even stronger channel than it has already become.

—Jeanniey Mullen