Alive and Kicking: Execs Agree that E-mail DM is Sound

If you ever want to rankle e-mail marketers, ask them if e-mail is dead or soon will be.

This is one of the questions we asked five industry luminaries in a series of one-on-one interviews. It should be noted that about the only thing they all agreed on is that e-mail’s most definitely not dead.

Participants in this year’s e-mail roundtable were Matt Blumberg, deliverability company Return Path’s CEO; John Rizzi, e-mail service provider e-Dialog’s CEO; Mike Hilts, ESP Yesmail’s president and general manager, Bill Nussey, ESP Silverpop’s CEO; and Michelle Eichner, deliverability firm Pivotal Veracity’s COO.

DIRECT: There’s been a lot of talk about the so-called death of e-mail in this industry. What are your thoughts on this?

BLUMBERG: Like many ridiculous rumors, this one is based in part on fact. It’s definitely true that the Internet generation doesn’t use e-mail as much as older generations. But they still use it. We work with a lot of social networking sites that struggle with deliverability issues because so much of their business is run on e-mail. We like to say that a lot of Web 2.0 is powered by e-mail. Bottom line: E-mail isn’t going anywhere.

RIZZI: That comment is so two years ago! On the contrary, e-mail is now mission-critical for most companies. Marketing budgets are shrinking, but e-mail budgets are holding stable or even growing in some instances. That’s because e-mail is the only medium that has the potential to be a true one-to-one communication. Plus, it’s highly measurable, so direct marketers know exactly which offers resonate with consumers and where to put their marketing dollars. And e-mail has a shorter development and deployment cycle than other media, which allows DMers to turn on a dime and react to changes in the market.

HILTS: E-mail is not dead. However, it is on a fatal path. The volume of commercial e-mail is growing at an alarming rate and can’t continue. E-mail is an effective way to communicate and interact with customers. Unfortunately, it’s still viewed and used primarily as a push-communication solution. E-mail’s real value is in its interactive communication capabilities. I believe marketers will embrace this aspect more in the coming years and move away from the mass mailing capability of e-mail and more toward its customer-interaction and dialogue capabilities.

EICHNER: E-mail has gone through massive changes in less than a decade but it is far from dead. Thanks to a decrease in the cost of devices such as smart phones, e-mail exists on several planes: the Web, desktop and handheld devices. To really understand this, marketers need to drop the term