 
avant|marketer: Do you think this is likely to change over the coming years? Is email’s role in the marketing mix likely to evolve substantially from where you see it now?
Rosalind Resnick: What I see happening now is the evolution of true multi-channel marketing. People have been talking about this for years, but finally it seems that multi-channel has started to happen. Now that we’ve finally gotten to the point where catalog companies and other direct marketers both on the B2C and B2B sides have developed a critical mass of email addresses to tie in into the huge amounts of postal address and purchase behavior data that they’ve had for years, we’re going to see email become merely a component in a larger strategy, as opposed to be a strategy, by itself.
avant|marketer: What are some examples of the sort of email-driven synergies we’re going to see working across marketing channels, going forward?
Rosalind Resnick: I think there will be different strategies for different marketers, depending on what they’re marketing. But, in general, the most important synergies will be created through the reinforcement of offline direct marketing messages by email.
For example, magazine publishers that have built up email databases will probably reap significant benefits from sending out a subscription renewal notice once by postal mail, and then following that up with three, four, or five email reminders, instead of using additional postal mail pieces. Postal mail has a large cost attached to it. What makes email such a powerful as a cross-channel marketing asset is that, no matter whether response rates are decreasing or not, with the supply of bandwidth where it’s at today with most large companies having T1 connections, the cost of doing an additional email blast is virtually zero. So, email becomes a very effective, yet bascially free way to drive conversions in synergy with offline. You start with an offline message, and reinforce it with email to take the customer to the point of conversion. This represents a tremendous cost-savings for companies.
avant|marketer: As you know, there is much talk right now of the branding power of the Internet. Along with this, there has been talk coming from a number of quarters suggesting that email should be leveraged as a branding tool, in addition to merely direct response. Is email going to ever evolve into a powerful branding medium, on a par with Print and Television?
Rosalind Resnick: No. And, I’ve never really understood that vision. Any company that wants to really do email branding would have to send out a huge amount of email messages to get the kind of advertising reach that you would get from say, a half-time spot on the Super Bowl. So, I really don’t see email developing into any sort of mass branding medium.
avant|marketer: Five years from now - which, admittedly, is a substantial amount of time in light of the pace of innovation in the Internet Advertising space - what formats will Internet Advertising come packaged in, and what will have happened to email by that time?
Rosalind Resnick: Jumping all the way to ten years from now, there is going to be no such thing as the “Internet Advertising industry”. Ten years from now, we’re simply going to have the “Advertising industry”.
Just as we’ve talked about earlier when we were talking about offline and online channels converging, there’s going to be a much larger convergence here. Ten years from now, there is going to be no question, for example, about whether email is part of a marketers mix. Almost every company is going to collect email addresses as a matter of course.
Looking at the history of media over the last hundred years, we can see that whenever a new medium bursts on the scene everyone says it’s going to be better than the old media, but what really happens at the end of the day is that the new medium is eventually just absorbed into the older mix.
Ironically, the future of this industry is that ten years from now it will be so successful that it will no longer exist.
|
