EmailLabs Predicts the Top Trends of 2005

EmailLabs recently sent out a press release with their top trends for 2005.

• The “Email Marketing Manager” role emerges as a full-time position.
• Email marketers that deploy best practices, adopt emerging authentication, accreditation, reputation technologies and solutions, and allocate the necessary resources will achieve superior delivery rates.
• Resource constraints fuel demand for consulting services.
• Companies continue shift from software to hosted model.
• Increased integration with corporate databases and other applications.
• Increasingly segmented and triggered emails will be driven by behavioral data, such as which specific links a recipient click, whether someone did or did not open an email, and what pages they visited on the company’s Web site.
• Design has become critical on a number of fronts including designing for challenges such as blocked images, the increased use of the “preview pane”, and using images instead of text to protect against content filters. Layout, readability and usability are critical to differentiating emails form “competing” emails, conveying value and trust, driving action and retaining subscribers.
• Look for email marketers to interface more with other departments, within the organization to increase the quality, effectiveness and brand building components of these “non-marketing messages”.
• Most legitimate marketers will be forced to improve their email practices, if they haven’t already, or they will find that their messages will be neither delivered nor opened.
• Look for savvy email marketers to spend more energy retaining, “reactivating” and recapturing subscribers and maximizing return through behavioral segmentation and analysis, than on growing their lists.
• Marketers cede control to customers; focus on building trust and lifetime value.
  

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.