The Future Of The Inbox: Five Upcoming Changes

Flood Coming

Email marketing is one of my favorite things, because it's got incredible advantages over other formats of marketing and advertising. Instead of worrying about whether you've got share of mind due to the world of multiple screens, you've got the same direct marketing metrics that you've had for, well, decades. You also get a get out of jail free card from fraud and viewability statistics, and don't need to worry about DVR skipping, massively expensive creative costs, or rendering issues at different sizes, assuming you've managed concur responsive coding. It may be the only form of advertising and marketing, especially on the digital side, where the world has gotten better in the last five years.

But that doesn't mean that the field is immune from change, or won't have to deal with new challenges in the next few years. Here's where we see the field going.

1) Dayparting will become machine driven. If you only ever read transaction email from e-commerce outside of business hours (because you work in an open office and don't want to be unprofessional as to be reading your personal email on someone else's dime)... well, the transaction email provider, if possible, should only want to send that email to you in the evening. And if the situations were reversed, so should the dayparting. 

Some marketers will hate this, because it will be another moment of automation over a professional service, and if that kind of thing happens enough, you're out of a job. But it's just too much of an engagement rise to be anything but ubiquitous later. 

2) Responsive coding will go away, because email will project. Just this last week, email went holographic thanks to Microsoft, who debuted a virtual reality goggle set that allowed the reader to experience 3-D and video in email. But who wants to walk around with goggles, really? A far more shovel-ready product is the idea that mobile phablets will just be able to show email in screen sizes that aren't limited to the mobile screen size. This already exists in some robot phones in Japan.

3) Subject lines will become verbal. As audio-assist tech (aka, your smartphone being able to handle your voice) becomes better and better, the in-box will become a matter of conversation, more than reading, because your list will have the option to have Siri read your emails. As you might guess, this is going to hit broader e-commerce plays harder and faster.

4) Creative will match other channels from dynamic elements. If you've seen a banner and gotten a coupon code, a follow-up email will need to pull in that code... or you've given up the ghost of knowing the actual credit for which part of your marketing and advertising mix generated the actual business. It would also help to match optimal offer, and help to optimize around this point. (If you hate paying for shipping but don't trust or react well to percentage off copy, your follow up email needs to have the first offer. It's just that simple, and can only work as automated elements.

5) Metrics will evolve. Opens, clicks, bounce and unsub rate are all well and good, and fantastic compared to what other marketers have to work with... but a live eROI is far more potent, and currently way too hard to determine. Heat map tracking to determine how long your creative is being viewed and where would also be a great step forward, along with a sense of how much scrolling happens to get a sense of how deep you can go before it's just you talking to your compliance team. 

The single best thing about email marketing is that it's always been data-driven; creative has always benefited from a Darwinian model of optimal work wins, rather than succumb to noise about branding elements. As we continue to move from appointment media to always-on, from controlled platform to catch as you can, the field will adapt. It always has.

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