The Evolution of Email Marketing: Past and Future

Anyone who says email hasn’t changed much in the past few decades is simply demonstrating that they don’t know much about email.

It’s a dangerous mistake for brands to underestimate the evolution of email marketing over the past couple of decades, as it sets them up to not be agile enough to cope with the coming changes—some of which are tectonic.

The major stages of email’s evolution so far include…

Email 1.0: Closed Platform
Email 2.0: Open Platform
Email 3.0: Spam-Complaint Filtering
Email 4.0: HTML Emails
Email 5.0: Mobile Emails
Email 6.0: Mobile HTML Emails
Email 7.0: Engagement-Based Filtering

And the next stages likely include…

Email 8.0: Big Data Personalization & Machine Learning
Email 9.0: Interactivity & Rich Content
Email 10.0: Wearables
Email 11.0: Internet of Things
Email 12.0: Voice Interfaces

For an explanation of all of those stages, especially those next stages that are starting to make a big impact on marketers…

>> Read the entire column on MarketingLand.com