According to a piece in Brand Republic, one of the bit sellers of emails (TMN) has seen a “marked reduction” in email marketing revenues.

This surprises me because at our end we (Hamilton House Mailings) are seeing a growth in email marketing. I believe this is largely due to the fact that in the last year there has been a growing awareness of how email marketing can be made to work, which has resulted in significantly higher response rates for many campaigns.

I believe that at first a substantial number of companies seemed to take the view that you could simply take a piece of direct mail and transform it into an email, while others worked on a strong visual presence within the email.

However with more and more people having systems that mean that they screen out the illustrations within in, what that has meant is that many promotional emails do not carry any sort of positive look – because all there are, are “x” marks where the picture should be picked up from the web site behind the email.

The way around this – and this is what we have seen much more of this year – is to work on very exciting subject lines and headlines that are clearly not going to be affected by any filtering system that the recipient has in place.

My colleagues and I are always happy to talk about such matters both on the creative side and the supply of email lists. There’s details of our email lists on www.yesmail.org.uk – where we cover business lists, consumer lists and educational lists.

Tony Attwood