Key Email Strategic Considerations for 2010
By Richard Rushing, Strategy Director

The beginning of the year gives email marketers an opportunity to refocus on their program's mission and goals, and, just as importantly, the subscriber experience. With that in mind, we encourage marketers to take some time to think about their overall email strategy, approaching it from both the business side as well as the subscriber side. The following are all key strategic considerations for program optimization:

• Create a mission statement to guide your strategy and approach
• Establish achievable, measurable goals and objectives for the email program
• Define value for the customers
• Align email programs with lifecycle phases

Motivation for 2010
By David Baker, VP

Welcome to 2010! It's the beginning of the year, and I don't feel complete without laying out some lofty predictions. 2009 has been an interesting year on many levels: the economy, financial systems, jobs, wars, a new president. From an online marketing perspective, it was a nice end to the year. Online sales were up this holiday season, and consumers seem to be a little more positive about spending. Our industry has had an interesting time this year, as well. Email has a great ROI and budgets for email are increasing slightly. How would I grade 2009?

TECHNICAL CORNER
Video in Email
By Erik Bigelow, eCRM Manager

We've reached 2010 and email has been around for a few decades. You might think that by now, that little oversight of sending videos in email must have been rectified. You probably thought HTML5 might be that shining star lighting the way towards video in email, didn't you?

In fact, HTML5 and its new <video> code tag is more akin to a star collapsing in on itself than a beacon of hope lighting our way to new frontiers of email campaigns and strategies. Before we even look into the black hole of video in email, however, I'll fill you in on the controversy that stands in the way of getting full support of video in HTML5.

When the W3C standards organization started penning the latest HTML specifications, they hoped finally to have a unified approach to embedding video into websites so we no longer have to rely on plug-ins. It was good in theory, but then came the decision of which codec to use. The two codecs in question are H.264 and Ogg Theora. They both have their strengths and weaknesses. Ogg Theora is open source and therefore no license fees are required, but arguably it isn't as fast or compressed as well as H.264. H.264 on the other hand, while being a shooting star, is held down by patents and fees that users have to pay to MPEG LA. Our digital deciders, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Mozilla, and Opera, went to the edge of the universe arguing, with no agreement in sight. Microsoft decided it would just not include the <video> tag in its browser. Mozilla and Opera both sided with the open-source solution, Ogg Theora. Google and Apple went with H.264, but Google also included support for Ogg Theora.

What does this mean for marketers? If you know your users are going to be looking at your email in Safari in their MobileMe accounts or in Entourage 2008 then you can send as much video as you like … if it's encoded in H.264. You can add a fallback image for the others, but it's not foolproof. A lot of users will still see a gray box with an X.

You may be starting to think video in email is hopeless for the next few years, and frankly, you'd be right, at least in a way that lets you target all your recipients. There are other solutions and work-arounds, including various third party tools, but these are equally limited as what you can do yourself. Until the pioneers push the boundaries further out on this issue, there is still nothing as elegant as a well-designed image-based html email.

ABOUT US

Razorfish eCRM Solutions is a dedicated solutions group in the Razorfish Network, built to support the evolving needs of our clients in building best-in-class marketing programs. The team is a comprehensive set of experts in email marketing and relationship marketing that supports all forms of strategic services, including strategic planning, communication roadmaps, email delivery and technology, campaign management and optimization with an emphasis on experience and analytical optimization.