What I’d like to see are analytical tools that tell me how customer behaviors are changing based on the breadth and depth of their relationship with a business. Are their core common behaviors or attributes that would give indication to how a customer’s relationship will evolve over time? What are their propensities towards particular behaviors now and in the future. How do product and service offerings and price alter behavior? Then using that feedback, we could design more customized experiences for online visitors that are more appropriate to their wants and needs. In this case, satisfaction becomes a good measure and likely correlates to the business KPIs. But when we only manage process, its virtually impossible to understand why the various customer behaviors manifest as they do or why the business is successful or not successful.

While I agree that the pronouncement might be a bit premature, unlike many in the business, I believe that WSJ is essentially correct. What? How can I say such blasphemy? It comes down to a very simple set of observations. Yes, email volumes are growing and yes, the effectiveness of email continues to be fairly strong for the moment. But what most experience has indicated is that email is moving away from the medium of communication to being a medium of notification. What do I mean by this? Well simply put, I predict with a few more years, email will essentially become one of yet a series of unified methods by which individuals are notified in ever more sophisticated ways that something of relevance has been created for someone by someone or something. Mobile will also likely play a part in this as well as will interactive television.

Its a little bit counter intuitive, but sadly email open rates response will grow, but not because they’ve discovered the secrets to creating great email messaging. Rather, as notification email such as those from Facebook or LinkedIn grow as a proportion of the total email being sent, these more personalized notifications will begin to skew overall results. At some point in time, I believe there will be a tipping point wherein the value of email as a medium outside of this process will crash. Email as we know it will cease to exist. Even in the corporate world, email will be replaced by ever more simplified collaboration tools. I for one won’t miss the day when everyone thinks of Outlook nostalgically as some clunky technology experiment that ran its course and then went extinct.

Yes there are many things that email can do today that social networking and business collaboration tools cannot. But that doesn’t mean its going to stay that way. Certainly, email has been around for so long that a very large audience has now grown accustomed to its use. The sheer number of users still using AOL accounts demonstrates this. But just as landline phones gave way to cell phones, dial up to broadband, and CRTs to flat screens; I have to admit, I believe email has peaked in its usefulness.

So what happened? What the heck is wrong with email anyway? Personally, I think it has more to do with the fact that as a medium email really hasn’t changed much since I started using it back at NASA more than 20 years ago.The fact that it is easy to use and provides great control for the individual user on whom they message what to is wonderful. This hasn’t quite been emulated by social networking yet, but its on the immediate horizon. No, what I think is killing email is essentially two issues. Neither of which Google Wave will solve.

First, spam is out of control. And I don’t mean spam from the official CAN-SPAM definition, but spam from the end user definition, which is the only one that matters anyway – which is more along the lines of why the hell am I receiving all this crappy content so often? I know I get far too much hay and too few needles. And this leads to the second problem, the marketers paradox. Yes, I could send less and make my end users far happier that I’m not carpet bombing their inbox with messages. But the truth is, volumes are so high these days, even from legitimate senders, that even if several large mailers were to simply disappear, you’d hardly even notice it in your inbox. As a marketer, all you’d see is a large drop in your overall effectiveness. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

I also believe that even though email has a great ROI, its amazing how little control marketers really have over the placement of their messaging compared to other mediums like online and traditional display, search, or even print and radio advertising. Marketers have no real idea what their email impressions are. Face it – deliverability and open rates are completely flawed metrics. Email marketers have no idea where their message falls in the end user inbox. Even with SEM and SEO you can attempt to improve your positioning. And display advertising is based on the very premise that you pay more for premium placement.

What email needs to do is develop a new framework. What I would propose is looking at the search model of SEM and SEO. Let’s layer a CPC model on top of email. Yes that will add a cost, but if in return ISPs provide back real data like true delivery and open rates; true impressions at the inbox, spam folder, trash, or other folder level; rankings against other mailers – it could be worth it. Real spam shops would likely either disappear or fall by the wayside as they aren’t going to want to bid on placement within the inbox. That would require them to give a traceable financial product which would be used to alert federal and international investigators. If pay for placement were coupled with historical relevancy measures calculated using recency of click by IP or sender domain, then marketers would be given a real motivation to improve the quality of their messaging. In fact, if ‘relevancy’ reached some threshold, bulk email to certain individuals could be delivered for free. ESPs would then have to provide methods to achieve this and the quality of the inbox would improve in ways that are nearly impossible to imagine. An entire cottage industry could be created akin to SEM and SEO with similar integrated tools. EEM and EEO would provide ever increasing value both for the consumer and email marketers.

Without something on this level, I suspect that email will be banished sometime in the near future, particularly as those who were born in the Web 2.0 world begin to move into and take over senior roles in business. Let’s face it – when was the last time you received SPAM on your Facebook account? And to be given the ultimate control to hide someone – poof, the problem goes away. I suspect FB and its brethren will continue to refine controls on messaging and display ads in such a way that the commercialization of html white space will subside a bit. In return, individuals will be given the chose to be monetized by marketers, much as they have been through email today, or alternatively through payment for more control over their experience. Its the latter case that will have the biggest impact on online marketing, particularly email. The very individuals who are willing to pay to not be merchandized each and every moment are likely to be the very same individuals that marketers want to reach. If we give FB the reason to give its members tighter control over what marketing they receive, they certainly will create it. And at that point, no matter how much email we send, we will be forced into the world of email only as notification.