Nick Fuller (pictured) responds to recent research from Forrester about declining European email affinity.

Forrester’s recent report on consumer attitudes to email showed a trend across Europe for declining consumer attention and increasing likelihood to delete.  Although the reasons often vary by country (particularly around attitudes to privacy), the overall picture is pretty consistent and amply reflects the need for an improvement in relevance as marketers seek to adapt this most established of digital channels to a changing landscape.

This is not such a new phenomenon. More than ten years ago, when Seth Godin was evangelising the principle of ‘permission marketing’, we, as marketers, found ourselves in a new landscape – one in which the consumer controlled our ability to speak to them. We could no longer buy audiences and send campaigns based solely on whether or not we felt that the target was right for our message as had been happening in direct mail for many years. This seemed like a seismic shift and it was. Nowadays it’s an absolute standard principle.

In 2011 then, we should heed the findings of Forrester and consider their impact with flexibility rather than fear. We should also see this response to email in the wiser perspective of trends in European direct marketing.

Of great importance among these, is the growth of smartphones and consumers’ consequent use of them to view their emails – this is a major change and requires focus in design and production to ensure the quality of user experience.

Mobile, however, has a much wider impact on the marketing landscape. For example, we are now working with brands to combine email and SMS in multi-touch programmes where the two channels complement each other by serving distinct objectives. Increasingly too, clients are seeing apps, mobile Internet sites and location-based services as logical extensions of their online strategies.

And then comes the tablet – another game changer?

Certainly the potential for iPads and beyond in terms of creativity and impactful content are exciting (our recent work for a client in creating specific rich media content within email for iPad users has delivered much early promise). But investment in such platforms as a marketing channel will, of course, only follow their uptake in substantial numbers by consumers.

Work to be done

The growth of social media has of course been exhaustively documented but there is still much work to be done in defining the best way to harness the buzz of social rather then being lost in its noise.

The ongoing debate about the value of a social follower or ‘Like’, is inevitably going to rage for some time. Many brands are concentrating on using email to send traffic to social and the opposite – using vast social audiences to create opt-ins for email programs. On the horizon, though, is a more fundamental question – can social environments be effective shopfronts in their own right?

The advent of Facebook Mall alongside transactional tabs and embedded brochures suggests this is exactly where social is heading and that such changes will create a very different playing field – albeit one in which email will likely remain the trigger for consumers to act, as countless previous research studies have shown.

The importance of winning this battle is evidenced by Marketing Sherpa research in 2010 which showed brands were planning significant increases in investment in both email and social (59% and 69% respectively.)

Combining mobile, email and social may be a start towards the elusive aim of ‘multi-channel marketing’ – certainly the pragmatic approach taken by brands in the examples above is a good sign.

Such pragmatism informs the debate around technological readiness – the Single Customer View and CRM requirements – and places it in the context of HOW these channels are effectively used in delivering relevance. It is relevance that the Forrester report rightly acknowledges as being the key to success in consumers’ eyes.

Relevance, of course, needs data and here lies the challenge for marketers in 2011 and 2012. Data is sourced either by consumers volunteering it or by brands capturing it by watching. With the new EU ePrivacy Directives, the acts of watching, measuring and tracking promise to be among the most important marketing trends for the coming year.

As marketers, we are all debating the best way to define and collect ‘positive consent’ and apply it to new channels (most notably to display through Behavioural Advertising) and we must get the balance right here.

If we don’t, if we are unable to balance what the consumer wants, with managing and quelling their privacy fears, then the very shift in relevance that both consumer and marketer would welcome could be derailed.

Nick Fuller is VP Strategy & Analytics, e-Dialog.