Special Delivery: E-Mail Marketers Look Ahead To 2008

(Direct) Speak to e-mail marketers for any length of time about their craft, and sooner or later the topic of deliverability will come up.

This year's e-mail roundtable was no exception as four top e-mailers outlined what they see as having the biggest impact on the industry in the last year and going into 2008. The consensus: There's no easy answer when it comes to reaching the inbox.

Participants also had interesting things to say about changes they'd like to see in their clients' behavior. Logistics forced Direct to conduct this roundtable virtually through separate interviews with Bill Nussey, CEO of e-mail service provider Silverpop; Luis Rivera, CEO of ESP Lyris Inc. (formerly J.L. Halsey); Scott Olrich, CMO at e-mail marketing technology firm Responsys; and Tricia Robinson-Pridemore, vice president, market and product strategy for e-mail insourcing technology company StrongMail Systems.

DIRECT: What's had the most profound impact on the e-mail marketing industry in the past year?

NUSSEY: People are actually starting to do multichannel integration. That was originally conceived of as 'Hey, let's tie our direct mail and our e-mail together and hit 'em twice.' The results were positive. But what we're seeing now is Web analytics systems and e-mail systems getting tied together and much more real-time or semi-real-time behavior-based targeting being done, rather than the old-school 'target segment, infer results and target segment again.' I think we're seeing a completely different view of how multichannel marketing works.

DIRECT: Shop.org's State of Retailing Online 2007 report backs you up on that. Twenty-eight percent of the retailers surveyed said they'd tried behavior-based targeting and 24% gave it very high marks, indicating that not many are doing it, but those that are have seen results.

NUSSEY: Here's the trick: Everybody knows behavior-based targeting works, but the amount of trouble involved has been a barrier. As the capability becomes more available and marketers can just click buttons to do it, people will use it. But if they have to run an IT integration project, or pay $25,000 to their e-mail service provider to do it manually, then they're not going to try it. That feature will penetrate the market as more ESPs make it available in their tools. The story of this industry is the availability of technology.

RIVERA: What's happened during the last year is more internal fighting, particularly among C-level officers, as to the right technology and the right medium to be advertising on. I say that because, with the emergence of Web 2.0, clearly a lot of areas such as MySpace, YouTube and RSS have gotten a lot of attention. But the workhorse is really e-mail marketing. At the executive level, people really don't understand that. More importantly, they see e-mail as something trivial, so they'll say 'Just go ahead and blast that campaign.' It's interesting that we even hear the word 'blast' today, because it means you're not even thinking about your e-mail. But marketers are beginning to realize that e-mail really is about reputation. If they're not sensitive to their readers, then one, they can just block them; or two, they can simply get off the list. So on one hand you have executives saying 'Just blast that list and get me some leads,' and on the other you have people saying 'I really can't do that.'

ROBINSON-PRIDEMORE: A big thing that's happened to e-mail marketers during the last year is that budgets have increased. That's a good indicator of channel adoption — not how much mail people are sending, but the quality of the mail.