According to Forrester, email marketing will be a $4B industry by 2011. As Anna Chernis, senior research manager with DMA stated in eMarketer on October 30, 2007, “Email produces the highest response rate for lead generation — especially for house campaigns — of direct mail methods we have studied.”

Most advertisers think of email marketing as purely push tactics that can be added to other campaigns. But, an increasing number of strategists are realizing that running strategic, relevantly targeted campaigns within emails can drive tremendous benefit.

Inbox marketing campaigns have the benefit of being very cost effective, which in turn means strong ROI for performance marketers. Inbox ads are measurable, and unlike their other online cousins search and display, the underlying toolsets offer timely, real, data that inform better optimization because it is personalized optimization. It is this personalization that separates email from other marketing segments and makes it — when well-executed — a great branding vehicle.

With creative units that are similar to the branded web pages that consumers find familiar, inbox ads provide immediate, controlled brand recognition.

Inbox advertising networks are now creating the same media opportunities in their channel that companies like Advertising.com created in the display channel. How? By aggregating a significant amount of inbox ad inventory, opening it to a marketplace and serving the advertising intelligently. It can be targeted behaviorally and contextually. The underlying toolsets provide marketers with optimization and analytics.