Deliver us from SPAM evil

Dan Leahul’s article discussing Forrester Research’s Annual E-mail Marketing Forecast caught my eye the other day. The Forecast is predicting email spend to "balloon" to $2bn (£1.2bn) by 2014, a nearly 11% compound annual growth rate, and that the average UK in-box will be inundated by over 9,000 e-mails annually over the same period. The latter stat is actually rather conservative, I believe, given that our American cousins are already being inundated with over 12,000 e-missives per anum, according to US DMA figures.

I like digital and social media, but I’m also highly suspicious of them – at least in their current guise. We’ve seen various e-pundits bang on and on about the ‘magic bullet’ potential of the likes of Twitter and e-mail in recent months, only to see some marketing professionals SPAM-ing the crap out of the entire populus and/or boring followers senseless with banal tweets.

I’m big on data hygene and security, but with the rise in the use of the digital channel, surely validity and better channel integration is where the marketing rubber is really going to hit the response road over the months ahead. Add online lead generation (OLG) into the mix and the customer data- and transactional insight that’s going to be required of savvy marketers is going to be as enormous as it will need to be sophisticated. ‘One-offer-for-all’-type marketeers need to exit onto new career paths now, I’m afraid.

I’ve been discussing these issues with my colleague Dawn Orr a lot of late. As marketers transition from volume- to value-based campaign models, we believe the new ‘holy trinity’ of customer data is quality, price and validity. Specific to online, whether your data capture is via bespoke landing pages or the likes of online games, surveys, quizzes or social networking sites, the ‘stickier’ and more response-geared these are, the more detailed (and valuable), the leads – and sales - generated.

We’re certainly seeing some exciting new DM trends unfold. Let’s just hope we’re collectively smart enough to fully exploit their potential and not just perpetrate the ‘junk mail’ stigma of yore into online.