Email marketing will have a strong 2012 With the marketing mix becoming much more varied - as online technologies mature - and previously separate marketing channels become far more integrated, it easy is to get caught up in the latest trends and lose sight of the things that make business to business marketing successful. 2011 saw social media rise to new heights and it was inevitable that it would soon be adopted as a core business tool. Social media marketing in many ways reinvigorated firms' online marketing efforts and allowed them to refocus their aims on producing far-reaching campaigns that spanned a plethora of different platforms. It was this 'all inclusive' attitude towards social interaction that set the pace of marketing in 2011, which is why we saw firms returning to tried and tested methods - like B2B email marketing - but using them in fresh, integrated and innovative ways. While there were a number of new tools also pushing their way into the mainstream - such as online video and the rapidly growing platform of mobile marketing - it is clear that underpinning all this innovation were familiar techniques and methodologies. While content was to remain king for 2011 web-based marketing strategies, data was the cornerstone of B2B marketing - in particularly, segregated, up-to-date, highly-organised business lists. It is this underpinning of sound business data and insight that meant so-called 'traditional' marketing platforms - like email - remained extremely popular. This looks set to continue in 2012 with email marketing is set to undergo something of a resurgence and staying high on the agenda for digital marketing specialists. Interestingly, one of the key reasons that email will have such as successful 2012 is because of the rise of new methods of communication which were previously seen as rivals - namely social media and mobile. Far from undermining email as a rock solid business to business marketing tool, social media and the rise of smartphones and tablets have, in many ways, made it far more useful to the marketing professional. For starters, access to email has become both instant and continuous. People can check there emails 24/7 using any number of new technologies - you can even gain access to it through your TV and mp3 player. This 'always on' view of email has cemented its reputation as the all-pervasive communication tool of choice. Its benefits over and above social media marketing are clear. It is targeted - if you have the right business data to underpin it - it can be easily personalised and it is easy to measure the success of it. What's more, with the clever use of new technologies, it can be far more responsive than it has been in the past. So what will the key goals be for the email marketing professional in 2012? First up, businesses need to get the targeting of their marketing messages right. Email marketing is ubiquitous and millions of messages will simply go unread or be blocked by spam filters - particularly as a result of poor email design. This means the data used for your mailshots needs to be high quality. It is no use going into 2012, spamming potential clients and customers from lists that have out-of-date information on them. Businesses will need to start using their B2B marketing data lists more intelligently if they are to boost email penetration rates. Secondly there is the design. Many messages are deleted because they don't display properly or cause inboxes to malfunction. Email design will continue to be a hugely important factor when it comes to business to business marketing. With the rise of mobile technologies you must also consider smaller screen resolutions if you intend to run mobile email marketing campaigns. Source: http://directmarketing.thomsonlocal.com/News-Advice/News-Archive/Marketing-News/?storyId=84683
Another good article to post roundy, good find. To comment on this, I think email might see another landmark year in 2012 like it did in 2001 and 2005 where the rules change. Now this is purely an opinion of mine, so free feel to debate this point guys, but I think this is the year ip reputation becomes more important than ever. Its mattered for years now, so I am not pointing out anything surprising here but its getting to the point, at least for the majors and the in my opinion scary rise of gmail as the fastest growing player since they have been taking over more and more GI. So in my humble opinion, I think this is the year churn and burn mailers will take major hits in delivery, where new domains will be screened even sooner than they already are, and if you don't have great warm up strategies sending any kind of mass volume is going to be even harder. I based this opinion on how content seems to be still a huge factor in where your message is placed, and of course will still block you in a heart beat if you make mistakes, but ip rep is where it is at in 2012. I'm gearing towards making brands out of domains, and really pushing that brand like any real product. I have my own techniques that keep landing pages on these mailing domains to avoid the dirty redirects at least on the direct masked links in my actual messages, and not sending 100% commercial email through them. Learn how to find transactional messages to throw in there, now you may be asking, well where the hell do I find that? Well that will be your challenge, as the days of communication being slow and pushing out volume so fast before the blacklists catch up will slowly become harder and harder to do, the antis are grouping up and finding their way in to our circles and with the advances of yahoo's tech being grouped up with google's incredible tracking power from the search engines, to social media, to email, to your browser, youtube and about 500 more things they will be able to find anything so its again, my opinion, that finding the ability to brand domains that you can keep for years instead of months will make the difference from making decent money to making major money in email. And we all know how much total money there is in email traffic, so as the smaller mailers get pushed out that leaves huge openings for the ones with the technology or the ones with the lasting brands to clean up on their share. Just my 2 cents.
