eROI Days Email Agency

6. Email campaigns and customer life-cycle email triggers will integrate seamlessly into social networking sites and tools.
–Yes, this functionality has already started to happen within a few Email Service Providers (ESP), but it will become much more prevalent. We have started to see the easy use of ShareThis or AddThis type of technology in some ESPs but we will start to see true use of the integration into Facebook, Twitter and other micro-blogging systems as the year progresses. What will make any of this impactful to your email campaigns will be IF the consumer adopts using it. It is the new FTF (Forward to Friend) of the social age and may be seen as less intrusive as a medium than forwarding an email to someone. The benefit of this: 1. It will permeate more than just 1 person and can be seen by others following or “Friends” of that person you send it to in their update stream. 2. It has some SEO lift with content being placed into the social media stream of consciousness that sticks past the inbox and gets deeper into the web. This means that you should be more cognizant of the terms, links and key words you are using in your copy as this can only help you organically. And yet at the same time it can also attach content like Google AdWords and other keyword relevant ad servers against your content.

5. Email is a whole lot more mobile today, but the formatting is still crap. You’ll see this improve dramatically in ‘09.
–10% of social network users are already using mobile as the main way that they are accessing and updating content. This ties into the email use as well on mobile devices. They go hand in hand in uptick. And we are also seeing data plans for mobile web going to unlimited status of use in plans while mobile carriers are still sticking to the old notion of minutes of airtime as a billing method. To me this means that more people will use the mobile web more than voice as a way to control costs.