ONE-TO-ONE MARKETING: Comment - All hail the brave new world of permission marketing via email

In a recent Forrester Research report, 'Essentials of integrated marketing', it was noted that "in the next decade, marketing will be defined by one grim reality: consumers will have more power to avoid ads."

Spam has become a symbol of consumer frustration with cannon-blast marketing that intrudes into their lives. Email has become the number one communication medium on the planet, so much so that email outpaces paper in terms of business communication by a factor of 10 to one over the past 12 months.

More than 30 billion emails are sent worldwide each day. Everyone knows email is inexpensive, flexible, intrusive, and simple to implement. We also know there are serious initiatives afoot to filter it, limit its reach and control its content.

Yet, even with all these issues, email marketing will one day exceed newspapers as the preferred marketing vehicle. But the email of the future will be radically different from what we experience today. It will be more accurately targeted, with enhanced subscription techniques, segmentation technologies, and messaging capabilities. By comparison, today's systems will look positively archaic.

Permission email marketing will transform into a technology that uses a handshake protocol between sender and receiver. These technologies will eventually help achieve a higher degree of satisfaction between marketers/publishers/individuals and their audiences. Permission is the key; it means messages are anticipated, personal and relevant. The most important part of this permission troika is 'anticipated'. Spam is not just anticipated - it's dreaded.

One of the key drivers of this move is permission-based newsletters.

It's a strategy that will succeed for a number of reasons: with newsletters that have fixed delivery intervals, readers will anticipate and expect communications. This will ultimately reverse lacklustre click-through metrics. Newsletters can brand products and services in addition to sending selling messages, which is practically impossible to do in an eDM.

Click mining and profiling will also improve the email acquisition process and foster better permission-based relationships. These techniques produce email lists based on a true need, fuelled by a consumer impulse. In essence, they create a pull, as opposed to a push, process.

At some time in the not too distant future, convergence will really take hold. There will be integration of voice and video with email for reasons of authentication and security, as well as for messaging. As email becomes more compatible with telephone and television, interactive emails will become the norm. And usage will explode.

Hello, new world!