The State of Email Marketing in 2007
A snapshot of email marketing in 2007: spam still dominated global traffic, mobile reading was just beginning and authentication became table stakes.
Take a snapshot of email marketing at the end of 2007 and you see a channel operating in a strange split: legitimate, permission-based programs were more sophisticated and better measured than ever, while the volume of unwanted spam clogging the broader email ecosystem was, by most industry monitoring, still the majority of all email traffic worldwide. Both things were true at once, and both shaped what a real business had to deal with this year.
Deliverability became a discipline of its own
By 2007, getting a message to the inbox was no longer just a matter of following CAN-SPAM’s rules. Major mailbox providers, AOL, Yahoo and the fast-growing Gmail among them, were running increasingly sophisticated filtering that weighed sender reputation, complaint rates, authentication status and subscriber engagement all together. Feedback loop programs, where an ISP tells a sender when a recipient marks a message as spam, became something serious senders actively monitored rather than an obscure technical option. Authentication protocols that verify a message came from the domain it claims to, technologies that had been gaining adoption over the prior two years, were increasingly treated as a baseline requirement rather than an advanced technique.
Mobile reading started, quietly
The iPhone launched in the middle of this year, and while it did not immediately change how most businesses designed their email campaigns, it planted the first seed of a shift that would take years to fully play out: people beginning to read email on a phone rather than only at a desktop. Most templates in 2007 were still designed with a fixed-width layout built for a desktop email client, and few marketers were yet testing how their campaigns rendered on a small screen. That gap would only widen before it closed.
Gmail’s growth changed the competitive landscape among inboxes
Gmail moved from an invite-only curiosity to a mailbox competing with AOL and Yahoo for market share this year, bringing with it a search-first interface, conversation threading and a spam filter widely regarded as unusually effective. For marketers, that meant a growing share of subscribers were reading mail inside an interface that made it trivially easy to find, archive or report anything that felt like noise, which raised the bar on relevance even further.
Email service providers kept consolidating capability
The gap between a basic list-and-blast tool and a full-featured platform kept narrowing this year, as providers added segmentation, automated triggered sends and more detailed reporting as standard features rather than premium add-ons. Businesses that had started with the simplest available tools a few years earlier increasingly had access to capabilities that once required custom development.
What this meant for a business running a program
The state of email marketing at the close of 2007 rewarded senders who treated deliverability as an ongoing operational task, not a one-time setup. Authenticate your domain, watch your complaint and bounce rates, prune inactive subscribers before they drag down your reputation and keep an eye on how your layout might look on the small but growing number of screens that were not sitting on a desk. None of that was flashy advice, but it was the difference between a program that kept reaching the inbox and one that slowly, invisibly, stopped.
Keep exploring: browse more Email Marketing guides, see everything we published in 2007 or check out the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
