Five ways to change with the email marketing times

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1. Take responsibility for rendering and deliverability
I often hear marketers blame overzealous ISP filters and blacklists, new versions of web email clients, spammers and the like for their deliverability issues without taking any responsibility for addressing these challenges on their own. Yes, rendering, for example, can be an obstacle. But when it comes to getting your emails into the inbox as designed, you can solve most of your challenges with a simple redesign of your email. By following best practices and proper design techniques, you can optimize your email program and increase the ROI even more.

2. Clarify email's role in your marketing mix
The traditional all-in-one role of email no longer makes sense. Google AdWords is clearly better at customer acquisition than email. PR and print advertising are better suited for brand building. RSS is emerging as an efficient means of publishing certain types of ever-changing information.

In my opinion, email's core strength is building and deepening relationships with one-to-one life-cycle messaging that moves customers and prospects down a conversion path. That process looks different for a B2B company with a nine-month sales cycle than for a "buy now" e-tailer, but ultimately both companies are using email to win new customers, drive repeat business and enhance relationships.

3. Make a business-based case for the right resources
If you want to change how your company allocates resources to email, you've got to clarify what it does for your business. Take SEM. It does one thing really well: customer acquisition. CEOs clearly understand what customer acquisition is and how it drives revenue goals, so allocating resources to SEM makes sense.

Here are some important questions to ask: How does email relate to lead generation and sales? What level of email-marketing ROI is required to achieve the company's goals? What staffing and budgets do you need to deliver that ROI? How do delivery and rendering challenges keep you from increasing ROI?

4. Start segmenting, and hire the ones who know how
Most of us are downright clueless when it comes to serving up our email content so it is at its juiciest, tastiest and most relevant for each recipient. The promised land of email relevance is dynamic content -- personalized subject lines, offers, articles and products -- all customized to each recipient's behavior and life-cycle stage.

Smart companies will hire the people who intimately understand how to turn customer and web analytics data into user-behavior segments and create customized email campaigns that are most relevant for each segment.

5. Make technology work for you
A survey from database marketing firm Extraprise claims that nearly two-thirds of B2B companies seek marketing automation in the tools they purchase this year. It's no wonder. Trying to make sense of sales and marketing data from several different tools is quite a task for people who may not be technology-minded to begin with.

Over the next few years, email tools will adopt "smart" features that do much of the heavy lifting for you, from segmentation to executing trigger-based, life-cycle campaigns to incorporating design and deliverability best practices. You will also see greater built-in integration of formerly disparate tools, such as email marketing, web content management and analytics.

This increased automation will make your job easier, but you will still need to periodically adjust your email marketing program to account for changes in email clients, ISP policies and end-user behavior.

Conclusion
Email marketing has changed considerably over the last several years, but two things haven't changed: Email remains a high ROI tactic, and most marketing organizations remain ill-equipped to execute it powerfully. In light of the new challenges you're facing, companies must address this resource-to-ROI imbalance to stay competitive.

Loren McDonald is chief marketing officer of J.L. Halsey. Read full bio.