Along with the eec, the DMA, and the Online Marketing Summit, Bulldog Solutions last week hosted a live webinar called “Straight from the Source: Top Online and Email Marketing Trends for 2008.” The eec’s Jeanniey Mullen and Aaron Kahlow from the OMS put together a really insightful joint presentation highlighting key issues for 2008. I won’t rehash it, you can view a recording here.

Any interactive webinar, but especially one on such a broad topic, serves as a great data- and insight-collection tool. From audience questions and the responses to polls and surveys, we benefit from a peek into marketers’ big pain points. Along those lines, an interesting bit of data.

At the beginning of the webinar, we asked the audience to identify the single area of online marketing on which they wanted more insight. The results show demand for email marketing guidance (no surprise there) and various levels of demand for insight into other areas.

We asked the same question at the end of the webinar. After hearing Jeanniey’s drilldown into key email marketing issues and Aaron’s coverage of the other five choices, the audience began to lean toward information on Analytics and Customer Experience. (Close to 200 attendees responded to the first poll, and about 140 to the second poll.)

Did Aaron open a can of worms with his focus on the need for an Analytics strategy to match business metrics? Did his insightful example of a less-than-stellar British Airways website experience send chills down marketers’ spines? (Actually, on that second one, I’m pretty sure the answer is, “yes.”) View it for yourself and post your comments here.

—Amy Bills of Bulldog Solutions

Anyone who thinks the messaging systems in social networking sites will completely replace general consumer email is an idiot, plain and simple. Analysts, pseudo-journalists and bloggers have recently been spewing some cockamamie notion that consumers will dump their inboxes in favor of communicating through the likes of Facebook and MySpace precluding email marketers from reaching their customers. All these morons have to do is interview any 12-year-old to learn that the underpinnings of communicating through MySpace are driven by email. Want to open a Facebook account? Oh, wait! You need an email address. You might be thinking why I care so much about what this small spec in the blogosphere says? The answer is simple. I’m protecting your email marketing budget and your job. Sometimes the press likes to run with whacky predictions without doing adequate fact checking and the last thing I want is for your CEO to read some half-baked article written by a college intern about how the whole world is going to ditch their email accounts for social networking.

In fact, I predict just the opposite will happen in 2008. Social networking websites will open their networks to become the new inbox providers of choice for ages 25 and younger. Instead of trying to fight your way into the inboxes of Yahoo and Hotmail users, MySpace and Facebook will become the new gatekeepers of younger generations. The reason why I’m so confident in my prediction is the simple fact that email is a daily time consuming ritual that can’t be ignored by online advertisers. And as social networking sites gain a larger share of advertising budgets, they will need to guarantee visitor time. Therefore email will have to be included in social networking’s repertoire of services cannibalizing market share from AOL, Yahoo and the rest of the old guard.

The argument to counter my prediction is that younger and even some older generations are spending less time in their inbox and instead are using social networking sites and SMS to communicate with friends and family. While I agree with most of this sentiment, it’s a far cry from the doom and gloom coming from the anti-email establishment, especially since social networking message systems and general email will become synonymous as MySpace and Facebook race to increase ad revenue. Don’t get me wrong, eventually email marketers will have to contend with sharing some of their budget with similar mediums such as SMS. But don’t let your CEO become enamored by some pie in the sky notion of a digital fantasy land.

—Elie Ashery of Gold Lasso

We asked the Voices of Email to look into their crystal balls and foretell what 2008 had in store for the email marketing industry. Here are their predictions:

Stephanie Miller of Return Path:
#1 - Email Marketers, if you want to keep your job, segment your file. I was hoping that last year would be the year that we’d see more targeted, tailored, relevant campaigns and less batch and blast. Not sure that happened, although I was half right in that we certainly saw MORE segmentation and targeting than in 2006.

Why will email marketers lose their job if they don’t do it now? Because the email channel is more expensive than ever, and there are too many risks to brand and customer satisfaction and loyalty. Unhappy email subscribers—all that dead wood on your file—is not just a missed opportunity, it’s a liability. Engaging with those folks is going to take more time and effort in creative and list hygiene and segmentation than ever before. To get those budgets, the email marketer has to prove the channel. To prove the channel, the email messages have to be a lot more relevant. To be relevant, they must be segmented. Thankfully, the technology and best practices are already in place and proven. We just need to set our minds to it.

#2 - The Data Capture form goes multichannel. We’ll see more and more email marketers open up their data capture form to include permission to contact via SMS and mobile marketing. Building up the database with these contact touch points will be increasingly important as more marketers start to test the efficacy of those channels.

#3 - Transactions will become touchpoints sometimes too hot to handle. More email marketers are going to push the envelope on turning transactional messages into marketing opportunities. The receivers and FTC will get stricter on standards, potentially causing trouble for some senders. With the need to dynamically create, message and track these messages, ESPs will aggressively go after the transactional email market to build their base and capture higher share of wallet.

Chip House of ExactTarget: Increasing focus on subscriber engagement. When emphasizing the importance of list hygiene, David Daniels of Jupiter Research often compares mailing the portion of your list that hasn’t opened or clicked on your emails in several months to “flying an advertisement over a ghost town.” Many marketers are realizing the benefits to their success potential via email by truly understanding which segments of their list are responding, and which aren’t. The non-responsive segments drag down your deliverability and ROI, and waste your time. This is something that I like to call the “ignore rate.” Marketers that ignore the needs of their subscribers, send irrelevant communications, or make other blunders leading to dissatisfied subscribers, drive a higher ignore rate.

Most sophisticated email marketers now closely track their open and click rates, and more are even tracking subscriber spam complaints by ISP. However, it is often what you don’t see that can be most harmful to your deliverability and campaign ROI. More marketers are beginning to see the benefits of closely analyzing the portion of their customer base that IS NOT paying attention. By doing so they can better reactivate them, opt them in again, or discard them—all to the benefit of their response rates and ROI.

2008 is about flying hundreds of planes, towing just the right message, over hundreds of small cities.

Amy Bills of Bulldog Solutions: I think we will see some shaking out in the use of social media for lead generation. Right now, a lot of companies are really struggling to understand what works and what can be integrated into their existing strategies. Is a blog, a podcast, RSS, an online community, a presence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. going to be worth the effort and resources? How can you even measure their effect on your objectives? And of course, what works for one company is not going to be the same formula for another. Some have the impulse to try everything. Others want to bury their heads in the sand and deny the landscape is changing at all. A third group is experimenting and trying to be smart about making good choices, thinking about what their prospects will respond to and how to make social media enhance what they are already doing.

After Paul Dunay joined Bulldog in November for a webinar on making sense of social media for BtoB marketing, he made a comment that really stuck with me. “[The question isn’t] if social media is right for your company, but which social media is right for your company. And at this point in time and state of your company, you need to determine which social media is right for your company for next year. A year from now, the picture may look very different. And the answer to which social media is right for your company will be different for each company. My advice is look into next year with an eye toward experimenting with a few tactics to begin to get yourself and your team up to speed.”

So, I predict that more marketers will ease into that third group, and start to get smarter about social media. And by “smarter” I mean more creative and experienced about how to make tactics work and measure their results, and brave enough to admit when a particular tactic might not work.

Tricia Robinson of StrongMail Systems: The email space gets larger and faster daily. With this growth comes change, and I predict we’ll experience much change in 2008.

Automation Becomes The New Buzzword. We’ve lived through closing-the-loop, 1to1 digi-dialogues, and deliverability. Look for campaign automation to catch-on in 2008. We’re seeing more clients rapidly move in this direction. Those that already have are realizing the time/cost benefits of auto-generated programs.

The Final Sunset for the Old Homegrowns. The replacement of the original homegrown system has been a trend since 2006. However, this year we’ll see the last of the first homegrown systems built by Web 1.0 companies and those that thought “email is easy, we’ll make our own.” Some organizations will always custom-build, but most have done it on top of something more sophisticated than generic MTAs.

All Outbound Customer Email Includes Marketing. Even if it’s the inclusion of a logo, all outbound customer email (transactional, customer service, promotional, etc.) will include a touch of marketing. According to MarketingSherpa in mid-2007, 90% of email marketers planned to overhaul their transactional email in the next 12 months. Not sure if they will meet their own deadline by June, but look for an improvement in the look of all outbound email. I’m not crazy enough to predict the death of the text email, but maybe next year.

Still More Acquisitions. 2004-2006 were large vendor consolidation years in our space. I argue that 2007 was the year of the IPO. Now with more cash and CNBC viewers to consider, look for Constant Contact and ExactTarget to make purchases that round out their offerings or extend their reach into new markets.

Unlike many, I like change. It’s good to shake things up as long as the goal is always towards improvement. Happy New Year!

Chad White of the eec: 2008 will be the year that retailers and other B2C marketers increase the transparency of their email programs and relinquish more control to subscribers. In 2007 we saw more retailers allow potential subscribers to view a sample email before signing up. More also offered emails on different topics or allowed some level of content preference selection—which is key to elevating relevancy. Consumers are getting very used to having more control over how they’re marketed to, and email will be forced to fall in line over time. On the upside, giving consumers more control over content and frequency, and being more upfront about those aspects of their email programs, should generate more lifetime value from subscribers. Although eventually we’ll see this kind of control move to the front end, during 2008 we’ll start to see it more and more on the tail end of the relationship when subscribers are fed up and trying to opt out. Rather than lose subscribers, more marketers will give up control over frequency and other elements to boost retention.

During 2008 we’ll also see retailers pay more attention to content—product reviews, videos of product demonstrations and fashion shows, blogs, articles, podcasts, etc.—and do a better job of leveraging it in their email channels.

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

Flimp Media: Web Video Marketing: The Birth of a New Online Marketing Application
The meaning and benefits of interactive web video.

Listrak: The Art and Science of Email Marketing
Art is all about form and content, and like art, your emails must inspire your audience to perform your end goal.

ExactTarget: The Top Email Power Trends for 2007
A mid-year look at what's working for the winners.

DMNews: Study - DM, email blend ups spend
Integrating digital advertising with direct mail campaigns can increase customer spend by almost 25%.

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

Greg Cangialosi is an eec member and a widely recognized expert in the digital space. When I read his recent blog post I knew I had to blog about it too (and not just because he mentions me in the post). It is right on the money—and does a great job of articulating what many of us are thinking. Thanks, Greg, for keeping the conversation alive.

—Jeanniey Mullen

The answer…
91% --> Yes, email is a digital application and is very much a digital platform.
9% --> No, email is not innovative and not even considered digital by most consumers.

Are you surprised by this collective wisdom? Share your thoughts below.

Also, visit the EEC homepage to answer the latest Two-Click Survey question:
Do the benefits of list rental outweigh the risks?

-->Read more Two-Click Survey Results

As email marketing continues to evolve, the way we think about email must also evolve. Email has become the way that almost every one of our consumers not only communicates, but manages their lives. This means that as marketers and advertisers we must create email communications that not only facilitate fantastic relationships, but also integrate seamlessly into the lifestyle and personal management choices our customers employ.

Email is more successful when it is not used in a vacuum. Even if the integration is as simple as acknowledgement and awareness of other media elements the consumer may interact with (social networks, blogs, search, display, print, TV), email is much more powerful when it can generate engagement with other modes of communication.

With that said, at the eec, we want to practice what we preach, and do a better job at integrating our emails with the other ways and places people interact.

Please join our founder, Jeanniey Mullen, on LinkedIn or on Facebook to engage in real time conversations about email, and help us keep our email content as relevant as possible. (Don't forget to add Ali, Chad and your other eec friends to your friend list!)

On Facebook, join the "unofficial" eec group and definitely take a second to rsvp to the first eec event (coming in February).

Enjoy!

The eec team

Every time someone says they don’t believe in email, an email fairy dies—and another one just bit the dust. Why? Because Susan Hallenbeck is losing faith in email to reach college students.

Recently, in a post on her blog, Refracted Higher Education, Susan bemoans that “younger GenXers and Millennials…seem to be relying more heavily on text messaging, Facebook, and other forms of social networking to communicate with one another.” She links to a Pew Internet report from July that said, “Email, once the cutting edge ‘killer app,’ is losing its privileged place among many teens as they express preferences for instant messaging and text messaging as ways to connect with their friends.”

She also links to an iMedia Connection article by Tiffany Young, who says that “While 89% of teenagers have email addresses and check their email regularly, it seems they've collectively decided ‘email is for talking to old people, like parents and teachers’,” quoting from the Pew Internet report as well.

Tiffany correctly says that keeping email viable among teens is all about having relevant messages. Give teens a reason to read your email and they will, and that includes tailoring content to their individual interests by allowing them to indicate their preferences.

I’d also say that you should play to email’s strengthens, which are that it handles HTML so you can have rich messages and it also handles longer form messages better than IM and texting. It makes me think of EB Games’ email newsletter, which I’m sure has many teen subscribers. The newsletter includes blurbs about new releases and several lists, including one about upcoming releases—all of which wouldn’t render well via other communication methods.

Susan points out that teens (as well as everyone else) have multiple email accounts that they use for different purposes, and that because of that teens many not check all of their email accounts super regularly. EB Games deals with this reality by only sending two emails per week generally and not including any “today only” deals, which are so popular among retailers. Having deals that are good for the week are probably much more appropriate for teens who might be checking their email less frequently.

Of course, with the media splintering, you have to reach out to teens through new mediums by launching blogs (like Neiman Marcus just did), by setting up shop on Facebook (like AllPosters.com just did), and by tapping into YouTube (as TigerDirect just did). And, of course, email can support and be integrated with all of these other communication tools.

So don’t give up on email, Susan. Email has reinvented itself several times already and is constantly morphing to fit in and maintain its standing in the web 2.0 world.

—Chad White

OK guys... I am obsessed with figuring this out now. Maybe I have been drinking the email Kool-Aid for way to long—heck, I even brew it in my basement these days. But I need your help to figure out the answer to this question:

Should email be considered one of the services we speak about when we talk about “digital”?

Why am I asking? Because there seems to be two camps:

1- The group who claims email is not innovative, not digital, and not even considered digital in the minds of the consumers.

2- The group that feels that email is a digital application and is very much a digital platform.

If anyone cares to provide thoughts or arguments in either direction I would love to hear them.

—Jeanniey Mullen

Last Wednesday I spoke on a keynote panel at DM Days focused on the future of digital marketing and how it played a role in our business culture today relative to budgets, decision making, key successes, measurement and trends. The panel was moderated by Scott Delea from Digital Grit, and included me, Bryan Eisenberg from FutureNow, Rodney Spady from Novartis and Hillary Evans from Y & R’s Brand Buzz.

It was an open panel focused around the future of digital, but had a few highlights I thought would be fun to share with you. One of the elements discussed was that digital marketing budgets are reported to be 7% of total marketing spend—and the question was, is that accurate?

We all gave our thoughts, and my comment that we are undervaluing the budgetary commitment to digital marketing resonated with most people. While traditional marketing budget fell within marketing groups only, digital marketing can be seen in all aspects of the company—advertising, call centers and face to face. When you consider the total investment on digital efforts, the number is closer to 27%.

Another item discussed was, what is the one thing that will help marketers move into a digital space quickly? My response was database alignment. But not just relying on enhancements to current enterprise databases, but intelligently mapping current legacy databases to the digital data available via other channels, like Google and other data centers. This way of managing and collecting behavioral and demographic data will push us light years into the future.

Lastly, we spoke about email and how, in the digital world, the landscape is getting crowded. With all of the new digital channels out there, the customer can very quickly become confused as to where to focus attention, and how to focus attention on marketing. Email acts as a guide to keep people on track.

One thing I walked away with from this panel was a new appreciation for the power of digital in our marketing and advertising world. I wonder what the next great way for marketers to leverage this vehicle will be.

—Jeanniey Mullen

BtoBOnline noted in a recent article on video email, “B-to-B marketers are finding that using video in email can help deliver their messages to audiences more effectively, as long as they follow a few simple rules.” The article urged marketers not to “shy away” from using video in email.

I think our sales team here at Bulldog would agree. The team has been experimenting with a new video email product—to rave reviews. With a webcam and a relatively simple setup process, they’re creating and sending personalized emails containing short videos, clickable links and a call to action. No additional burden on the production team: Just record, write the message and send.

Bulldog’s CEO, Rob Solomon, embraced the technology immediately, as he always does when he suspects something will be both fun and productive. The rest of the team, after working out the “I don’t understand this!” kinks, is also getting into it.

After a testing period, we’ll measure the results, comparing traction (opens, clicks, demos) sans video email with the results we’re seeing from the video email. We’ve been testing more complex video components for a while in our monthly newsletter, where the addition of video is driving interest in the content, and in client campaigns, where video is being used for promotional invitations, registrant communications and follow-ups.

But those are heavier lifting, requiring scripting and production. Seeing the results for our sales team of the high level of personalization being added with relatively low labor requirements is a great way to end the week.

—Amy Bills

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