As consumers increasingly reject marketing emails as spam, marketers must improve their relevancy. Acxiom Digital's VP/GM describes how.

I realize that we are now three-plus months into 2007, but I don't think it's too late for me to give email marketers a rallying cry for the year. So why am I proclaiming this, "The Year of Email Relevance"?

With email continuing to grow at double-digit rates, marketers will be harder pressed than ever to remain relevant to their subscribers in 2007. It's no secret that email interaction rates have tended to shift slowly but surely downward over the last few years. If your campaigns aren't, you can stop reading now and wait until next month for my latest words of wisdom. For the rest of us, the key questions are, "What's behind this trend, and what can we do?"

The answer is both a good and bad news situation.

The good news is that strong email ROI has made it an increasingly favored tactic for digital marketers. This, despite the downward trend in open and (too a lesser degree) click rates. So most email marketers are spending more in 2007 than they did in 2006, in both B2C and B2B.

The bad news is that more marketers sending more emails is suppressing interaction rates. To make matters worse, as people receive more emails, we've seen that their definition of "spam" tends to broaden beyond "mail from a company I don't know" to include "mail from a company that sends me too much" and even "mail from a company I opted to receive, but no longer find valuable."

It's clear from this that consumers are getting fed up with irrelevant content. Increasingly, they expect to have content tailored for their needs and are willing to reveal a little about themselves to get it. This is supported by a recent ChoiceStream study that showed an increasing willingness for people to "trade" things like demographic information or monitored web behavior in return for more personalized (in other words, relevant) content from email marketers.

So how do you make your email more relevant? The best way to do so is to know your customer, wherever she is. Time and again we've seen that companies that integrate data more broadly across all marketing channels -- or at least all online channels -- also analyze data more completely. Integration enables marketers to drive more relevant communications because they will be able to deliver a customer experience that more closely matches their needs.

This is not easy. In fact, the goal of truly integrated digital campaigns remains largely unmet at this time. There is still minimal integration between search, web and email campaigns at most companies, leaving the individual user experience not fully personalized within or across channels, including email.

There are several emerging solutions that will make integrating the online customer experience much easier, but in the meantime, there are three other ways to make progress in developing more relevant email: test, test and test.

Multivariate testing is the fastest way to improve relevance over time, but even this approach can sometimes seem daunting for email marketers. An easy place to start is simply copy testing. According to a recent MarketingSherpa report, in five of the top six testing categories, relatively easy copy tweaks show the most ROI. These tweaks include landing page copy, subject-line testing and offer testing.

Another approach we've used effectively is eye-tracking testing, in which we learn what elements of an email actual consumers look at when they receive it. By combining this testing with in-market testing, marketers can understand not just what works in an email, but why it works. For example, when we recently compared top- and bottom-performing holiday emails for a retailer, we learned that viewers of the bottom-performing email didn't notice the free shipping offer. The email itself looked nice, but the design and layout got in the way of the most important thing to be communicated!

Another way to boost your open and click rates is to treat all non-responders as virtual unsubscribes; those who no longer find your emails relevant. Your job is to re-acquire them with new offers and creative that they find relevant. For a major West Coast financial services provider, we created a very simple reactivation program. Here's what we did:

First wave

• Identified non-responders in the database
• Reduced emails from one per month to one every other month
• Tested a new subject line that read "Your [month][brand] newsletter" to imply timeliness (month) and relevance (brand), as opposed to the old SL, which used a proprietary name for the newsletter

Second wave

• Identified continuing non-openers
• Sent a "time to renew" email

How did we do? Opens and clicks rose 5 percent for this group, suggesting modest reactivation with little incremental effort.

Again, the point I'm making is that if you want to increase the relevancy of your email (and thus your open and click rates) you can't be afraid to test anything and everything, including content, targeting, landing pages and design. A broad-minded approach to testing will help you find ways to improve your email while you build the argument for that enterprise customer database integration project that will solve all of your problems.

Chris Marriott is vice president and GM, Eastern Region, Acxiom Digital. Read full bio.