New Year ushered in with a blast and also with promises and opportunities for you all. If the last year highlighted Email Marketing’s growing clout as the major online medium to communicate, promote, educate, inform and offer, and to reach out to the growing profile of internet savvy customers and prospects, this year will be no different and the good trend continues. Most of the business houses, traditional, big or small, would piggy back on the medium of email marketing to reach their prospective or loyal customers. Taking a look at last year’s email marketing progress and developments that have been taking place in the e-marketing world, we have come up with a list of trends that might shape 2005.   E-Marketers will continue to realize that recipients’ permission is more important than pressing the Send button. E-Marketers will develop in-house subscriber lists, through various legitimate methods rather than taking help of vendors, swapping lists or through other illegitimate techniques. E-Marketers will not only create legitimate data bases but also segment the lists, by considering each recipients need and interest. E-Marketers will become more cautious with the usage of words in their content. Content will become more and more compliant with various email spam filters; otherwise a single red word would trigger the anti-spam content filter, resulting in email bounce back or emails ending up in the junk pile. I suggest that e-marketers should take a good look at anti-spam email filters and the words, and html designs that activate them, before creating their content. This year E-Marketers will also realize the importance of placing a system to monitor bounces, email filters, compliance with permission based lists, etc, to make sure that they do not appear in blacklist and are compliant with Internet Service Providers’ (ISP) white list. They cannot afford to lose their valuable customers and prospects, and their sound reputation by being in the blacklist. Email Marketing ASPs will have their own stringent rules to deal with clients who are spamming and not compliant with regulations. E-Marketers will start practicing what they have been saying all along, i.e. personalized communication. After assessing the needs of each recipient, they will design offers, information and promotional matter to be sent to each recipient. You may get one offer and I may get an altogether different one, depending upon your and my needs and interests. This will also result in restructuring of email frequency. Depending upon the relevance of the offer to the subscribing recipient, the email timing and date will be decided. So, the kind of offer is going to dictate ‘when to’ and ‘whom to’ send the email. Like last year, more and more business houses will hunt for email marketing application service provider’s (ASP), to manage their email marketing campaigns. It is becoming increasingly difficult for a business house to keep pace with the changing technology of email marketing software, the regulations, emerging authentication protocol like SPF, domain keys, etc. Email Service Providers not only have the latest know-how but also provide easy to use solutions and are compliant with current regulations and changes, thus making it easier for companies to concentrate on their core business. Business houses will not only hunt for email marketing ASPs, but also consulting firms and agencies to handle the whole campaign. Companies will rely on specialized agencies to write email content, design email formats, send emails, track emails and analyze email marketing campaign results, and other related functions. The companies will surely have their own employees to keep watch on what is happening, but it is believed that campaign development and domain management will be outsourced to consulting firms and agencies having expertise in this field. Is the ‘From’ address trusted by your recipients? ‘From’ address will play a pivotal role in the initial success of the email marketing campaign. ‘From’ addresses will have names of marketing, sales, customer service- representatives rather than company’s name. This will provide a personal touch to emails and help in building one to one relationship with email recipients. Most of the promotional emails are using HMTL to give their emails an eye catching look. HTML designs will play a key role in sustaining recipients’ interest, as most of the time the recipient reads only 10 to 20 percent of the text. Proper usage of images in place of texts may considerably reduce chances of emails being blocked by anti spam content filters. E-Marketers will recognize the benefits of good email marketing. They will have a list of dos and don’t of email marketing and will also ensure that their campaigns are CAN-SPAM compliant. The deluge of spam emails has resulted in stringent anti-spam filters and anti-spam technologies that not only blocks illegitimate emails but also legitimate ones. Warm Regards. Victor Benchmarkemail.com Click here to view back issues of Benchmarkemail I hope you have found the above information helpful. You can email me at service@bmesrv.com or visit me on the online chat between 9:30-4:30 EST.