The whole relationship will be more valuable to all involved

I hope to see the industry continue on working toward a way to quickly and easily adapt messaging to smaller groups of customers, so that the whole relationship is more valuable to all involved… I didn’t say it was going to be ground-breaking.

There is probably a blog a day written about creating a personalised one-on-one customer experience, utilising email. It’s one thing to talk about an ideal but I've seen how limiting and frustrating it can be when you actually try to create one; I've been in teams where we have had to settle for 'the possible' instead of 'the dream'. I think I can safely say, most of our intentions as an industry are in the right place. You start a project with these sky high hopes and wild ideas, that this certain customer profile will receive said experience, and so on, but your sensible co-worker keeps batting them all back with a reason why it's not that simple (usually because of data or technology).

Some might say the GDPR will slow down any such progress with what we can talk to our subscribers about, but I see it as more of an opportunity for teams to actually take a close look at their data, re-establish any forgotten relationships and really make the most of a densely interested database.

So taking it all the way back to the roots of a largely over complicated and disjointed ESP offering, maybe my prediction is this; a complete refresh of the email process. I want/hope to see email tech and ESP's begin to make it easier for email marketers to do their job; manoeuvrable, connected data, smarter tech/journey builders and inspired copy from us all. I'm not sure that's the exact point I started with but we got there, somewhere, in the end.

Get #EmailWeekly at Emailweekly.co