Inbox Insider: E-mail marketing trends are getting more complex

Our Essential Guide to E-mail Marketing is coming out next month, and we are deep in the process of editing a slew of pieces from industry leaders. It is hopefully going to be an inspiring read for e-mail marketers. The articles range in topic from the basics of creating a campaign to in-depth explorations of the roles that deliverability, social media and triggered targeting play in a thorough e-mail program.

One of the big things that e-mailers are talking about is e-mail's place as social media becomes more prevalent. Currently, it is well positioned. After all, you can't have a Facebook or Twitter account without an e-mail address. E-mail marketers are taking advantage of this with tools such as share-to-social, and helping to address the basic infrastructure of mailing within these networks. For example, ReturnPath and Goodmail are both working with MySpace to help with its internal mailing.

Another big theme is targeting. Be it geotargeting, behavioral targeting, contextual targeting, triggered targeting, all e-mail marketing thought leaders agree that having a refined execution based on targeting different people at different times will help increase ROI.

All of these ideas tie into another big topic, which is relevance. But since relevance is such an overused word in e-mail marketing, I think it is important to define it. Relevance within e-mail is to send content to the right person at the right time — content that specific recipient will respond to, because it is meaningful to his or her life.

With all the different tactics that e-mail marketers are using these days, the bar has been raised. E-mail is positioned to become even more relevant.