Your Email Will Go Grey One Day.
Email marketing has two very different levels, one will evolve the other will die.
SPAM is no longer black and white. Grey mail shows us how emails must continually evolve to provide value to the subscriber.
Grey mail is legal but (let’s say it) annoying email. Top annoyances are email frequency and content irrelevance.
To help the average person manage the volume of email they receive email providers are creating smart filters that will change the way your email is consumed.
Soon automated mailbox filtering will become standard, so those who are tailing on the end of old school ‘batch and blast’ emailing you should sit up and take notice.
Gmail’s beta ‘Gmail priority inbox’ and Hotmail’s ‘SmartScreen’ both use types of user classification to categorise emails such as social updates and newsletters then automatically categorise them as they hit an in box.
Most companies will need to change their email planning and deployment practices if they wish strong ongoing results.
Without going into unnecessary detail I can tell you that if you do not start planning how profile data, behavioural triggers and dynamic content allows your emails to become individualised and inherently more valuable your email will not get viewed and you will notice a massive decline in email ROI before the end of 2012. If you do not manage to evolve how your emails change to meet the needs of each individual then your email will be too easily de-prioritised by mail auto filters and you will loose contact with your customer or prospect.
This is not meant to be a post of doom; in fact more mature email marketers will notice a lift in email traffic quality albeit they will also experience a decline in open rates and traffic volume. Email recipients will view emails when they want or need to and these new tools will help them locate and consume email content in context, the end result being clicks will be more intentional, but hard won.
To stand out and become successful, those wanting to maintain successful email programs will learn how to provide the best service at the time when the recipient wants it so the recipient thinks of their email and knows where to find it when the need arises.
