ETail’s welcome cocktail party was well attended, as retailers from all over had just flown in and were looking to whet their whistles. People seemed excited for the show with a lot of talk, drinks and jokes.
Chuck Swenberg, vice president of sales and business at Habeas told me that there are a lot of new things cooking for e-mail. Look for compliance to get tighter, e-mail to get more expensive and analytics to get even better. Some things are under the radar, but he did say that he’s been paying a lot of attention to legislation in Australia, where an anti-spam bill is on the boards. The U.S. is a few years behind in compliance issues and he expects us to catch up soon enough, which will make it more difficult for e-mail marketers.
The thing to resist? Affiliate marketing. Even though it may seem like an open source of new leads, it is one of the most difficult things to manage in terms of compliance control, and marketers are responsible for their own behavior as well as that of their partners. Datran recently released a platform for marketers to be able to measure compliance of affiliates within their network, so perhaps we’ll see more trends of this nature.
