There was a lot of talk at the Summit this morning about the "F" word (Facebook) and Matt Blumberg of Return Path even did a very cogent Evolution of the F Word in Email Marketing.  He tracking the key drivers of success through the years of email marketing. He started with Focus, then moved to Free (long a dirty word due to the spam filters, but now we are free to be direct marketers again!), Feedback Loops, Frequency, Five (Airline Miles) - a reference to opening keynote Hal Brierley's talk about how millions of consumers will review and respond to ads for just five (wow!) airline frequent flier miles, Facebook and social networking which is driven by email marketing, and finally the word of choice for 2008 - Fundamental Mindshift.

It's a compelling legacy for the industry and shows our ability to adapt to subscriber needs and the technology available to us.

However, I would say that none of these F words mean anything if you don't got the R word - Relevancy.  It's the single most important attribute of an email marketing campaign and still many marketers don't have specific goals to achieve it.  Sure, we are measured on list growth and response rates and even subscriber satisfaction - which could be proxies for relevancy.  But we don't have specific and measurable goals around creating compelling and engaging subscriber experiences. 

If there is any hope for email marketing in 2008 and beyond it's got to be around creating relevancy.  If we can create great subscriber experiences, all the other things fall into place - higher revenue, higher LTV, more engaged files, larger list growth.