The Future Of Email Marketing?

With Google announcing their new IMAP accounts for customers, we thought it best we start to look towards the future of email marketing. For those of you who don’t know what IMAP is, it simply means an email account that can now be synchronised with mobile technology. So if a recipient checks their emails on their mobile, that will now be marked as read in their inboxes opposed to before where a copy was generated just for their phone. So what does that mean to us? Well, to start with email marketers are going to have to consider mobile email marketing a bit more than previously. I had already outlined in a previous post that b2b email marketers would have to consider mobile marketing a bit sooner than b2c orientated companies, but now that seems to be shifting somewhat. If it turns out that IMAP accounts prove popular with customers, you will be sure that the other leading email providers (hotmail, yahoo) will follow suit.

You must then consider that your message will now only get read once by mobile users, and that they may not read your email on a pc as your email will already be marked as read. Your email design will have to change somewhat to cater for this quickly expanding area. It will be worth your while to set up your own Google account so that you can see what your message will look like on mobiles. Obviously that brings you back to one of the longest running debates in email marketing, HTML design vs Text. If you’re considering mobile marketing it may be more tempting to move towards text as not only does your message render well in the recipients screen but it would also skip a lot of spam filter checking meaning a higher delivery into inboxes. I don’t believe this is the answer though. Successful email marketing campaigns evolve around differentiating yourself from the competition, and however interesting your subject matter may be, users will switch off if every promotional email they read is in a text format. I’m already an advocate of the HTML light (30 text) method of email design and believe that email marketers should work around that still as recipients will still read the majority of campaigns on their pc. So how can we cater for this market without sacrificing our whole design strategy? My personal thought is to start to heavily concentrate on list segmentation. For instance, if you placed all your Google recipients into a sub group you could then alter your main campaign to render well for mobile devices. This would of course mean a bit more work, but who’s scared of that when the chances of extra revenue increase?

mailingmanager is a full e-marketing solutions company that also offers spam filter analysis on its customers email campaigns. Visit the website or contact the company on info@mailingmanager.co.uk

Alex Fenwick works for mailingmanager (www.mailingmanager.co.uk) and assists customers in creating a successful email marketing campaign; specialising in deliverability and newsletter content.