Do You Still Email Like It's 1999?
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"Though all things Internet seem to move at the speed of light and come or go overnight, commercial email marketing is, impressively, approaching its 15th anniversary," writes Karen Talavera in an article at MarketingProfs.
And as we celebrate the channel's longevity, it's important to remember that best practices aren't evergreen. Strategies that worked back when email was a babe might now be woefully outdated—or even illegal.
To illustrate how far we've come, Talavera provides this compare-and-contrast snapshot:

List Building. In 1999, the concept of opt-in permission existed, but there was no such thing as CAN-SPAM, and marketers often gathered email addresses any way they could. Quantity mattered more than quality, even though lumbering lists of unresponsive recipients were inefficient. Today, we strive for lean-and-mean lists of highly engaged subscribers who crave the content we send.
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Comments
Jason Lorentz has written an excellent view from the trenches on current best practices as seen through the eyes of a Traffic Department - see it at The Daily Fix.
10 points for the post title - made me smile.
Truth is, we shouldn't even be emailing like it's 2005 or 2011. It's long overdue that email should be as interactive and actionable from within the message as other platforms from which we expect it: websites, mobile apps, even ads.
And it's a lot easier to create dynamic, seemingly-embedded content than one might think. The options are opening up, both for senders and recipients.
Long live email - into the future!