Here at Smartmail we’ve been thinking a lot about whether the current growth in online advertising is sustainable in a tighter economy.

Marketers are multi disciplined and often charged with a range of influence over the strategic and tactical activities of a business across sales, advertising, design, marketing, branding, customer service, sponsorships, events, promotions, and communications, internal and external. That’s a tall order by any measure!

With this in mind, Jericho (the company behind SmartMail) was created in 2000 with a singular focus on supporting the New Zealand marketer. Our focus is producing tools for marketers that allow them to produce attractive and useful material, measure the return on their marketing dollar, and work within the demands on their resources. It was marketers’ demand for email communication tools that led to the development of the first version of SmartMail back in 2001. Since then input from our clients has been fundamental in helping us to develop, redevelop and perfect SmartMail into the ultimate marketers toolkit it is today.

Designed to work for the user who is not a computer-whizz, but loaded with targeting, personalisation, automation and reporting tools, SmartMail provides thousands of users with the tools they need to communicate with customers and stakeholders. Clients use SmartMail to talk to people on databases from 500,000 to just a handful. New campaigns can be deployed on a frequency ranging from many times a day, to integrated one off campaigns. The best thing about SmartMail is that it puts the control back in the hands of the marketer, resulting in more relevant, personal and anticipated communications – and happy customers.

So, that’s all well and good, but do you think a recession is in the wings? And what does that mean to you? Marketers work smarter anyway. But when budgets are cut too, and resources pulled tighter, it’s often marketing who get chopped. Our friends the marketers are just so darn resourceful though, it’s possible they’ll simply get on with it and no one will notice any difference…

So what can we do to make sure marketers get the email marketing (or eDM) budget not only to grow year on year -to actually get acknowledged as a real channel with the best ROI in the arsenal? Heck – even getting it’s own line in the budget would be a start in many org’s, but we are pushing for more than that. Email works like DM on steriods when it’s treated at least as well as old-school DM – specialist design, tools, teams, and best practices.

This ‘r word’ is coming apparently, and it’s coming in at a critical point in the maturation of online marketing. Americans are spending 14 hours per week watching TV, and 14 hours a week on the internet. The DMA in the US shows latest ROI as $50 per $1 spent on email marketing.

I agree with some of my peers who fear that the recession poses both a very large opportunity and a very real risk to the hard-won gains in email marketing. Email is not as easy and cheap as we might have made it out to be in the ‘good old days’, but its certainly a lot more simple and cost effective than a print or TV campaign. It is rocket science, and experts like the SmartMail ones exist so that marketers can be sure the design, the technology and the delivery is taken care of – leaving you to plan, and count the money in the till at the end of the day!

Marketers who have done everything right and built up a permission data base of clients and stakeholders have a potential gold mine. They can work that list by using segmenatation and relevance to get results – heck they can get real, live, SALES! REVENUE! PROFIT! – the stuff the boss is going to get very excited about when for the last few years she’s been watching cheques for unmeasurable ‘branding’ campaigns flutter out the door like so many ethereal butterflies…

But you know what happens next don’t you? The boss figures out that if only the sales reps could access the database they’d keep the targets figure looking rosy for another few months…

If tighter budgets leave above the line advertisers looking around for some more bang for the buck, may their eyes alight upon eDM… may email get more of the recognition it earns for the bottom line, and long after the ‘r word’ ends, may our channel line entry on the marketing budget remain!

But we all have to hope they let their email experts advise them as to frequency, targetting and testiing… and email marketers are going to have to think really hard before they heave a whole lot more noise at this hard-won email database…

So, what are you going to pay attention to over the next few months? Plan, target, set goals, test brilliant design, and protect that database… then when the Sales Manager comes sniffing around for a last minute blast campaign you’ll be able to point out how he can fit into your plans… not vice versa!