A Peak into the Future of Emailing Marketing
I’ve been in the email marketing industry for close to 9 years now. Throughout that time I have seen the metamorphisis of email, and yes it has been just that. We’re starting to see major decreases in spam and better reputable deliverability. We’ve moved away from the mom and pop shop operations from the late 90’s to early 00’s into professional reputation based operations.
With that in mind I see email contiuning to be a huge influence in people’s lives. I remember attending the FTC.gov Anti-spam Conference in 2007 and listening them debate the spam issue and email in general. In 2003 many had predictaed that by 2007 that email would be dead. Suffice to say it is alive and well as ever.
The future of email marketing is very hard to predict. Everything is moving towards a reputation based service. ISPs want to know who you are and how much voulme you are sending on a daily basis. Most of the major ISP’s include Feedback loops (FBLs) that allow you to see an analysis of your delivery. These FBLs manage bounce rates, complaint ratios, and spamtraps hit. Each ISP is different but most expect at least a 90% deliverability rate while keeping your complaint ratio below .5%. The complaint ratio may seem high to alot of people but the truth is people would rather hit the “auto complain” button featured in yahoo, aol, and hotmail than unsubscribe from the email campign. There is still a prevaling fear among users that email marketers will use the unsubscribe link to verify their email to send out more campaigns. This simply isn’t true anymore. The reason is because now-adays the risk does not exceed the reward. Not only will your responce rate be extremly low, but you would be generating tons of heat towards your ISP as well as becoming a target for lawsuits, anti-spam networks, and other nasty threats.
With that being said, email will only get better in time. Users will get more of what they want and less of what they don’t want. As we regain the trust of our subscribers, they will have faith that yur unsubscribe link is a true opt-out.
Filed under: Email Marketing History