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I was recently asked to speak on the future of e-mail marketing at an e-mail marketing summit in Queensland. I presented 12 thoughts. Here’s a summary of the presentation for what it’s worth.

To put e-mail marketing in context: “Never before has a media been so enthusiastically accepted by customers but so appallingly abused by marketers, that laws have been created to restrict its use…yet so it is with e-mail”

The first three thoughts are:

1. We will continue to make the same mistakes...

2. We will continue to make the same mistakes...

3. We will continue to make the same mistakes...

For some reason, despite 40 years of university graduates with marketing degrees, 20 years of direct marketing certificate courses and 12 years of internet/interactive/online/digital/e-marketing courses, marketers still make the same mistakes over and over. We don’t study history, rather we are more interested in the new new thing for our resumes.

Fourth thought: The wrong people will be responsible for e-mail marketing (juniors not seniors)

E-mail is personal contact with your customer, so make sure senior management is responsible for all e-mail marketing. Don’t delegate responsibility down the management hierarchy.

Brand advertising is much easier to do than most other activities in marketing, yet senior marketers tend to focus their energies on brand executions – whatever they may be.

The hardest thing to do in marketing is to talk with relevance directly and personally to the people who pay your salaries (your customers) and get them to do what you want them to do. In other words the hardest thing to do in marketing isdirect marketing.

Yet senior management delegate direct marketing, such as e-mail messages to juniors and wonder why the results aren't what they want.

Fifth thought: Turn your marketing department upside down if you want to succeed

Give juniors responsibility for your brand advertising – they can be supervised. Make sure the most senior people are responsible for the e-mail marketing, because it costs very little to do very expensive damage to your brand, so why delegate the responsibility?

Sixth thought: Recognise and accept that e-mail marketing is not a cheap alternative to other marketing media – treat it with respect.

Why quibble over the cost to send messages that you can track, to people you know,when you don’t question paying enormous costs for messages in mass media you can’t track?

Seventh thought: Pay professionals to create the content for your e-mail messages

Rupert Murdoch is a very successful publisher because he pays professionals to produce his content. He doesn’t write the content himself. Make sure your copywriters understand direct marketing principles, because this is a direct media (not a digital media). Do not use digital copywriting spruikers or e-mail technologists to write your copy. It’s like getting a mechanic to do the brand plan for the launch of a new car!

If you think you can write, then bury an offer near the end of your copy – if people respond you know they’re reading your copy. If not, pay a professional.

Eighth thought: The media will become more important than the message.

People will access messages from a range of computerised on-line devices. If you can’t deliver to them you won’t have a relationship regardless of your content.

Ninth thought: E-mail as we know it will decline as the preferred method of communicating for anyone now aged under 20.

It’s dad’s technology. People will use closed social networks such as Facebook, or more likely the next fad network as their primary e-mail address (after all this is a fad generation using fad technology). And sms will continue to grow as a form of typed communication.

Tenth thought: PURLs (Personalised URLs) will replace generic landing pages.

PURLs are growing rapidly as the preferred form of landing page linking e-mail and mail to the web. A PURL uses the unique data of each contact on your list to populate the landing page, so every landing page is specific to an individual. Three outcomes mean the marketer knows:

•Who opens and does what you want

•Who opens and doesn’t do what you want

•Who doesn’t open the PURL

Marketers can then follow-up in a more relevant manner, based on behaviour.

Eleventh thought: Direct mail will continue to grow

Australia Post had a record year for volume of addressed advertising mail this year, thanks to PURLs, Impact Mail, and the huge amount of appalling and irrelevant e-mail messages. We’re already seeing marketers that migrated to e-mail to save money, rather than at their customers request, reverting back to direct mail.

E-mail is generally a lousy acquisition tool, but a good customer service tool and marketers who traditionally used direct mail for acquisition are now returning to mail to acquire new customers.

E-mail is also integrating with sms and phone. Marketers who send e-mails with special or limited offers are finding up to 98% of responses to the offers are coming via the telephone to call centres, because the customers don’t trust the e-mail technology to work for them when they respond. “They might get lost in the system and miss the offer”.

Twelfth thought: Those who test will have more success than those who don’t

My colleague and Gooruze Founder, Drayton Bird always says “direct marketing is the art of losing money in very small amounts, so you can make money in huge amounts.

Always test:

•From line •Subject line •Content – particularly above-the-fold •Offers and placement of same • Timing – time of day and day of week •Formats – text versus html versus rich media.

Most marketers assume HTML is the way to go with newsletters, yet I’ve seen tests where text outperforms HTML with graphics, by over 200%.

Unless you are a fortune teller who can predict the future, you are wasting your marketing budget by not testing.