…and the question is a simple one: is it enough?

One of email marketing’s great strengths is (or was) its robustness. It was relatively easy to get a campaign or newsletter to justify the efforts that went into it.

You could often make “mistakes” and still get a good return on your time and resources.

And that mentality still pervades much of the email marketing world. Never mind that good returns hide the fact that many (most) people don’t actually respond to what we send.

Each year, various people warn against this complacency, suggesting that what was good enough before won’t be good enough for the future. And each year we largely ignore the warnings because the same emails still do the business.

Will this year be different?

Check this graph:

<img src="http://www.olmblog.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/a2eb7_getaway.png" alt="email marketing quality trends” />

The green line is what most people do in email marketing. Minor improvements over time to the quality of their campaigns and newsletters.

The red line is the failure line, representing a minimum level of quality that still allows success. It’s going up as well, for reasons I’ll come to.

Most of us sit on the left-hand side of the graph. Our green line is higher than the red line. What we do is better than what you can get away with.

But at some point, if you keep doing more or less the same thing, the green line will dip below the red line…panic. This is what those warnings about complacency are about.

Most us haven’t hit that point yet. Which is why we maybe tire of seeing those warnings. But my intuition tells me that we’re all a lot closer to the red line than we think we are.

Why? Why now more than ever before?

Here my reasons…

1. Accelerating diversification of ways to communicate

A few years ago, if you wanted to keep up with new things at a website, you signed up to its email list. It was that or keep popping by every few days to manual check for yourself.

Today you have feeds (blogs), Twitter updates, mobile messaging and other ways of staying in touch. And even more ways of just communicating online. If anything, this diversification of media and channels is accelerating.

Attention is spread thinner, so you have to stand out more if you want your share.

2. Growing email competition

Competition in the inbox is still growing. Possibly faster than ever before.

First, social networks are, ironically, a new and big source of email. Morgan Stewart quotes a Hotmail product manager, who said:

“15-20% of email received at Hotmail is social media notifications”

Second, the economic woes of 2008/2009 led to an upsurge in interest in more cost-efficient, measurable and accountable ways of spending marketing cash. Enter email, waving a very large flag. Pauper to prince in a matter of months.

The result: more organizations sending more email. I see the stats that come out of the UK DMA’s national email benchmarking surveys and the volume of email sent via ESPs is hitting all-time highs again.

Many of those organizations are working hard to improve the quality of their emails. Meaning more competition and better competition than ever before.

3. Changing consumer expectations

With choice comes selectivity. Anybody want to deny that we consumers are more demanding than ever before?

The rise of social media both reflects and drives growing end-user empowerment that conditions us to expect more personal and valuable communication from organizations.

Email is not immune to that trend.

4. More diversity in display environments

Until relatively recently, nearly all email was read on a desktop. Despite the limitations of certain clients, the viewing context for emails was largely a known factor. Not any more.

The last year or two has seen massive growth in alternative viewing environments for email, most notably via smartphones and netbooks. Only yesterday we added another to the list: the iPad.

This isn’t just about design, it’s also about behavior. How does “mobile” functionality impact the way people use and respond to email messages?

5. Recent changes to the deliverability landscape

For the last few weeks and months, various people close to the process of managing and filtering incoming emails have been warning that “legitimate” senders and sources of bulk email are likely to face more rigorous control.

A related development is the intended (and to some extent implemented) move to relying more on how recipients interact with your emails to decide if those emails are worthy of delivery.

The kind of low response that still drives positive ROI may eventually not be enough to convince ISPs of your email’s value, leading to future problems with getting email delivered to the inbox.

In summary: I think the red line, the quality bar, isn’t a bar at all. It’s curving upwards this year. Is it, perhaps, finally time to heed those warnings?

Why wouldn’t you want to get better?

Of course, the convergence of those red and green lines isn’t the real reason to look to improve our emails. As Loren McDonald recently wrote:

“What worked a few years ago might not be irretrievably broken in 2010, but it’s probably not generating the level of returns that it could.”

The argument is a simple one: better emails generate better returns?

How do you improve your emails? The information is out there.

Related post: The slow death of your email (and how to stop it)

Copyright No man is an iland – The one question to ask of your email marketing in 2010