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catching and entertaining to see compared with pure text. With the development of
Internet and Web design technologies, the advantage of this vivid and consumer-friendly
email interface should get more flourishes in the future.
However, there are still several crucial aspects for effective email marketing being
ignored or downplayed by marketers, the overcoming of which might determine the
future of email marketing and its role in the whole strategic communication model.
First, several classic features of direct marketing seem not to be implemented
enough in email marketing, such as “call for action” phrases activating consumers’ direct
response for the advertising message. Similarly, scarce usage of incentives make
marketers risk losing attractiveness to consumers given the lack of interactivity and
benefits. More formats of incentives should be used more creatively and more
interactively.
Considering permission marketing, one of the most widely embraced alternatives
to cluster emails, most commercial emails do not even have any statement about their
permission of sending those emails to the consumer before. It seems that those
commercial emails are still keep exploding consumers’ inbox without justified reason,
which will definitely hurt the reputation of email marketing even worse.
As far as personalization is concerned, personalized approaches are poorly used
which may result in low level of personalization. When seeing a non-name email address
or phrases instead of real person’s name in the “sender” session, it is very unlikely for a
consumer to even open the message at all. For “receiver” part, it is strongly
recommended that the marketer should make a consumer feel the email is unique to
him/her, without copying to tens of people at the same time, which is like labeling the
Convention