Walter Penfold is MD of Prefix Technologies.

In 2011, we saw increasing adoption of international best practice combined with impressive local innovation, so we can expect more of the same this year as South African e-mail marketers continue to mature.

In 2012, ensuring that marketing campaigns remain relevant will be critical. In a cluttered marketplace, you have to find new ways to approach consumers to make them feel like individuals. Consumers are suffering from marketing information overload and extreme ‘Dear Valued Customer’ annoyance.

More e-mails will be opened and actually read on mobile devices, thanks to the exponential growth of smartphones and tablets. Nielsen has indicated that at least 45% of all mobile Web use is for checking e-mail. This is a great opportunity for the mobile marketer with the foresight to design mobile-friendly mail templates.

Cross-channelling will be another 2012 watchword. Deeper integration will take place between e-mail and social media. The low cost of creating a buzz for a product or event via social media platforms makes this a very cost-effective option for marketers.

We will also see more relevant content being driven to a more carefully-segmented customer base. Success will come to those who deliver more dynamic content and send more e-mails to the most active subscribers and fewer to those who are less active.

We can expect a surge in the amount of marketing research being conducted in 2012, as companies aim to succeed in effective customer segmentation and the delivery of genuinely relevant content.

A further trend expected is the growing importance of event messages. These will be mails that are sent due to some form of ‘prompting’ by the customer, eg, a ‘welcome’ message to new subscribers or a ‘thank you for shopping with us’ farewell. Alternatively, it could encompass queries, such as that prompted by a customer abandoning a shopping cart. It has been suggested that event messages can generate a five times greater return on investment than a standard weekly newsletter.

Those marketers that are able to focus their efforts on driving customer-centricity, effective cross-channelling and on data-driven, multi-channel marketing strategies, will lead the way during 2012.