Email Marketing: What to Watch Out For in 2012

Before delving into forecasts on the future of email marketing, it will be useful to have a look at where email "stands" amongst other digital channels. In recent years, email marketing has sometimes been overshadowed by mobile and social media's rising popularity, often categorized as an "old school" (aka boring!) marketing channel. Email marketing is anything but tired or dated - for example, a Pew survey in 2011 found that email has been consistently ranked as one of most popular online activities, alongside search:



Again, anything but tired, as new platforms and devices have significantly changed the web landscape over time, the power of email as a key marketing channel has remained constant. An email address, sometimes seen as the social security number of the digital age, is a highly sought-after commodity by advertisers and marketers. Check out this infographic from SmarterTools, which captures how email accounts and sends far surpass other posts and tweets from social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+:



Of course, email marketing should never be a standalone effort. What this infographic really suggests is how the intersection of web, email, mobile and social provides a very exciting opportunity for marketers in 2012. Research has shown, for example, that incorporating emails that have social sharing links have a significantly higher clickthrough rate (115% higher than emails that didn't incorporate social sharing), as uncovered in a study by GetResponse Email. Yet, the study found that only about 20% of email marketers actually include social sharing links in their emails, which could be for a variety of reasons, but if your target customers are active on social media, email can be a fantastic way to engage with your brand and encourage sharing.

If the future of email marketing is multi-channel (web-mobile-social-email), what exactly does it mean for marketers? Some experts in the email marketing community have provided their own advice on what to watch out for in 2012. Here's a snapshot of some of those insights:

•  "The efforts to continue to integrate email with social signals (and search as well) need to escalate. Online marketing has become so “un-siloed” in the recent past and it is important to make sure that there are KPI’s in place to at least monitor the impact or influence e-mail efforts has on social / search and vice versa." - Frank Reed, Managing Editor at Marketing Pilgrim.

•  "Expect further focus by webmail and ISPs to sift and sort inboxes and spam folders based on user engagement metrics. [...] The tools and compute power to do this in realtime are out there and growing in sophistication every day." - Tom Kulzer, CEO of AWeber.

•  "I see integration as the issue [...], now we can segment, but the smart marketers will figure out the interplay between email and social. They have to…these things are not siloed anymore." - Will Reynolds, Founder of SEER Interactive.

•  "The biggest challenge for all marketers, email marketers included, will be truly developing valuable, relevant and compelling content so those emails keep getting opened and, ultimately, driving sales."  - Joe Pulizzi, Founder of Content Marketing Institute.

Value, relevancy, context and social seem to be four priorities woven through many of the predictions on the future of email marketing. What are your top email marketing priorities for 2012?

Posted by Nicole Capelo at February 3, 2012 11:15 AM

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