Multi-Channel Messaging is the Future of Email Marketing

I wrote this blog for Lyris sometime in Jan 2010, when i was contracting for them so just publishing here on my blog post here.

In marketing we talk endlessly about the best approach to reach prospects and how to convert them into customers. The email marketing industry has come a long way and we have become experts at optimizing email campaigns using advanced segmentation, trigger email, A/B and multivariate testing, and optimizing our email send time for maximum conversion.

However, email marketing is no longer just about sending emails. Marketers are thinking of creative approaches to engage their customers with email marketing by personalizing a lot more and integrating campaigns across multiple channels.

Over the past three months, I have been connecting with our customers to understand their current challenges, areas of focus for the near future, and how they think email marketing is evolving in their business.

Here are four key ways I have learned that marketers are hoping to use email marketing in the coming years.

1) Mobile friendly email marketing

With smartphone adoption sky rocketing, marketers want email service providers to automatically detect what kind of phone it is and render the email to meet the device specifications. Furthermore, marketers would love to dynamically localize email content based on the location of the phone. For example if Apple sends out an email marketing campaign for the latest Tablet, and you open that email on your iPhone, the email would show an offer related to your area and the address of the nearest Apple Store based on your current location, with a small map.

2) Video streaming in the email inbox

Social video sites are becoming more popular compared to TV among some generations for viewing their favorite shows on demand. With more than a billion video views on YouTube every day, now more than ever marketers want to reach their customers using video messaging. Marketers are looking for an email solution that can accommodate standard YouTube embedded code and video so that email recipients can view video streams as soon as they open their email. Let’s hope all the internet services providers catch up with this technology to render video streaming. Furthermore, marketers are wishing for video email to be friendly for major mobile email clients too.

3) Email that is social media inbox friendly

There are over 350 million Facebook users, 50M+ LinkedIn professionals,100M+ MySpace users, and millions of users on other social sites - and still astonishing social networking growth is occurring. Furthermore, consumers are spending more time on social networks than ever before, making it the perfect place for marketers to send personalized messages via the social site inbox. Marketers can’t wait to send targeted messages to all their Facebook fans right into their Facebook inboxes and watch those messages go viral.

4) Email integration with online optimization products

Email is no longer a single channel; rather it is multi-channel messaging over the Internet, so marketers are seeking dynamic content and targeting as well as multivariate testing of dynamic content across all the channels. Marketers are seeking tight integration with market leading online optimization products such as Omniture Test & Target, Google Web Optimizer and SiteSpect.

Wow that’s a dream come true for any marketer! I don’t foresee all of this happening in 2010, but with the evolution of mobile, social media and online optimization there’s no doubt that the email marketing industry will continue to evolve and grow well into the future.