Tired of being an “email” square peg in an “online marketing” round hole? Feeling alone in this mad, mad, online marketing world? Now there’s a hub for the people who have shared the panic of pressing the “launch” button on a mailing to 1 million people. It’s the Email Experience Council.

The EEC is, well as they concisely state it, “…access to the latest thinking, best practices and strategies in email and digital marketing.” You have access to statistics, reports, blogs, as well as the ability to participate in roundtables that cover key issues in our industry.

Many of the participants are key figures within the Email Marketing community who really understand the issues facing our industry. It’s nice to see Email Marketing getting a bit more stature in the Interactive community. After all…we’re a smart, good-looking bunch.

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Over at Chief Marketer Josh Perlstein from Response Media has published an insightful list of 14 future trends in interactive marketing. This is a two part article that includes:

• Customer e-mail: Results are still improving
• RSS (Really Simple Syndication)
• Branded desktop applications and Instant Messaging (IM)
• Mobile communication
• Online media marketplace changes
• Multichannel marketing coordination and marketing-mix analysis
• Other ways to use search and new forms of search
• Community advertising
• Interactive TV and digital video recorders (DVRs)
• Proliferation of broadband, rich media, and video advertising
• Behavioral targeting, retargeting, and “personalized messaging”
• Gaming
• Promotions, streaming video, and interactive tools
• Multivariate optimization tools

Josh sums it up nicely:

“Industry studies continue to indicate that online communications can improve online and offline revenue and return on investment, time after time, in every industry and category, if executed and measured correctly. By understanding and appropriately testing developing trends and technologies in online communications, you can develop and optimize strategies that generate immediate behavioral response, shifts in brand perception, and positive financial impact.”

Article Links: Part 1, Part 2

This would be a good topic for a survey to the MIMA membership. Perhaps we’ll see something like that in conjunction with the 2006 Summit.