ExactTarget's 2006 Top Email Trends Shows Growing Sophistication in Email Marketing

Business Wire, Jan 4, 2006

INDIANAPOLIS -- ExactTarget, a developer of on-demand email marketing software solutions, announced its annual top email marketing trends for 2006, which show growing sophistication in email marketing. One year ago, trends involved relevancy and frequency of emails. Those are now the industry basics and the future focus is on deliverability, analytics and multi-channel marketing.

The top trends for 2006 are:

1. Deliverability will drive email success. Four main deliverability
    factors will be in play in the coming year:

    --  Reputation. Email practices are the single most important
        factor in determining if your email will be delivered. Who do
        you email to? What do you email? When do you email? Why? The
        answers to these questions will help determine the kind of
        reputation you have as a marketer.

    --  Technology. Domain keys and other authentication technologies
        are the table stakes; email marketers must implement them to
        be in the game. In addition, technology is required to help
        ensure you are not "mistaken" for a spammer, such as content
        screening before the send, and technology to review your data
        integrity for known bounces, spam traps and other things that
        can contaminate your list.

    --  The human element. A big part of successful deliverability
        comes down to human monitoring of your results across domains,
        dealing proactively with ISPs and individual companies and
        addressing problem areas.

    --  Design for deliverability. Design has to be flexible enough to
        deliver your message to various media in formats that work.
        This goes beyond HTML vs. Text, and includes designing for
        smartphones and for emails with images suppressed.

2. Open rate is over rated. Open rates do not tell us much about the
    success of an email campaign. How then should marketers gauge
    success? Engagement! Did subscribers click? Did they call? Do they
    order or fill out a form? We see emails that have 60 percent open
    rates and 1 percent click throughs, and emails with 40 percent
    open rates and 30 percent click through rates. Clearly, the latter
    is the more successful email.

3. Email metrics and web analytics will be integrated. To have insight
    to what subscribers do after getting an email, marketers must
    integrate email with web analytics. This will give marketers a
    much better indication of success as well as build behavioral data
    that will help them become more relevant.

4. Multi-channel marketing will deliver winning results. It has been
    widely publicized that a Nordstrom customer who interacts with
    three channels spends six times more than those who only interact
    through one channel. Another example, Hotels.com, uses email
    marketing/transactional hybrid messages to send an email before
    and after a customer's stay at a hotel. In addition to email and
    web analytics, the goal should be to measure and tie in all of
    your marketing efforts.

5. List growth will be healthy, but takes work. Average list turnover
    runs about 25 percent yearly due to unsubscribes and email
    addresses gone bad. A recent study by ExactTarget shows that list
    growth for many industries is healthy, with an annual net growth
    of 38 percent. As part of the study, ExactTarget spoke with
    marketing representatives from both B2B and B2C companies who
    maintained strong and consistent list growth. These organizations
    all have been very deliberate in growing their lists. Marketers
    need to focus continually on long-term list acquisition
    strategies, instead of quick fixes like co-registration and list
    purchases.

6. RSS will start to make an impact on email marketing. There is a lot
    of talk about RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and how it will
    affect email marketing. While 2006 will not be the year of
    widespread RSS adoption at the expense of email, there will be an
    opportunity for RSS to become a significant component of email
    marketing. The Indianapolis Colts are a great example of how to
    aggregate content in an email template and then distribute that
    content as an email to their fans. The content is available on the
    web at sites like NFL.com. The RSS feeds the information to a site
    that places it into the Colts' email template. Alternatively,
    marketers can make content for their emails available through an
    RSS feed that subscribers can choose to access through their RSS
    reader versus email.

7. Email will get more personalized. Who owns the relationship with
    your subscribers? An institution, a brand, or a person?
    Organizations realize one of the true beauties of email is the
    ability to communicate one-to-one on a large scale using tools
    such as "on your behalf."

8. Look for rich media in email. Rich media--such as streaming video
    and audio--have been difficult to include in email because of the
    large file sizes and scripting required. Now, better video
    software and increased bandwidth makes rich media more realistic.

9. Email as a carrier for third party advertising. Email is attractive
    to advertisers because it is targeted and trackable. Email
    marketers generally know quite a bit about who receives their
    messages. The key to success is that the ad has to fit with the
    expectations of the subscriber. You never want to abuse
    permission, violate privacy or be irrelevant.

10. The new metric: return on subscriber. Marketing with email will
    fail if marketers only are focused on the results of one email
    campaign versus another. The goal for 2006 must be to focus on
    return on subscriber, creating high customer lifetime value. This
    is accomplished by simply monitoring the value of your subscribers
    as individuals. Measure their value quarter-to-quarter, not
    campaign to campaign.