CRN reported that a recent Marshal poll showed 29% of their sample bought something from a spam email. I’m skeptical of that number, but whatever, spam and more respectable direct email marketing aren’t going away anytime soon.
The DMA Email Marketing Blog recently posted pondering the impact artificial intelligence and related technologies in email will have on e-mail marketing. They reference two Outlook plugins that are giving users new ways to look at their email, Xobni and my company, ClearContext.
I think that there’s a big opportunity for next-generation email apps to not only help get rid of unwanted email marketing, but to also help highlight email marketing messages that are relevant and wanted. ClearContext is not the only one interested in email prioritization, though we have some of the deepest experience and best understanding in the marketplace of how email prioritization impacts users in their day-to-day usage of email. Most people don’t use prioritization as an absolute guide to how they process email, but instead as an indicator for classes and groups of emails that they want to initally focus their attention on and which ones to completely ignore. In that first phase of email triage, smart technology can learn which classes of marketing email people actually care about.
Another advancement in email is understanding the nature of different types of emails and putting them in the appropriate context. The inbox is one big bucket where all email is handled the same way. But many people don’t want to deal with marketing emails while they are focused on getting their work done. On the other hand, they very well might want to see what discounts they have been sent from stores they frequent before doing some shopping online or heading to the mall. That’s where features like our Notification Managers can be used to automatically send entire classes of email like retail marketing messages into a specific area, perhaps categorized by retailer. Instead of frustrating people and getting deleted or unsubscribed from, these messages can be put in a context where people can get real value from them at the appropriate time.
A couple of commenters write that email marketers can succeed by "delivering useful, targeted content and offers on a regular basis" and that "relevance will dictate if an email is read or not." I think those comments are right on the money. The right next-generation email technology might banish unwanted direct marketing emails, but if done right, it will also identify and help people utilize the marketing emails that are actually relevant and valuable to them.