• by June 22, 2006

How many e-mail messages do you receive each day at work? How many at your personal e-mail address(es)? Do you have huge folders bulging with hefty attachments, images, assorted contact information you just can’t seem to part with, and other related arcana? Do you ever feel like trashing all your e-mail? Poof! What a feeling that would be!

The truth is, most of us can’t afford to trash it, and marketers are counting on that. Yes, marketers will continue their e-mail onslaught, though spam could surely kill e-mail marketing; more than two years after passage of the federal can-spam law, junk e-mail continues to flood our in-boxes.

Even so, e-mail marketing is more important than ever. We envision video e-mail and new sophisticated opt-in tools that will represent the future of permission-based marketing. This month’s feature package on e-mail takes these factors into account and includes all sorts of intelligence on the future of e-mail marketing, best practices, and tips on how to avoid common problems. It also offers case studies from Kahlua and InterContinental Hotels’ Indigo boutique. We also wondered whether the rise of RSS will put a damper on e-mail marketing, so we asked Lynn Russo to explore the issue.

This month’s Cross-Media Case Study examines Visa’s “Life Takes Visa” campaign and the innovative online work created by AKQA. The credit card giant embraced a multimedia approach that is a model for other consumer brands.

And Gavin O’Malley, who’s never one to shy away from a sensitive topic, convened the Creative Roundtable to discuss a campaign for an electric shaver from Philips that takes men’s personal grooming products to a whole new level. We’ll miss Gavin’s fun sensibility and wish him well at Advertising Age, which he joined last month.

In August, check out our take on mobile marketing. For now, happy summer!

Tobi Elkin, Editor