Please welcome Melinda Plemel!
Melinda Plemel is an email professional who has worked in the industry for more than 20 years and is now an Enhanced Services Specialist at Spamhaus. She has experience that ranges from technical account management to deliverability consulting to ISP relationships to anti-spam consultant to brand ambassador. She’s led the industry in understanding how filtering technologies work globally, and has a knack for making sense out of chaos.
Melinda’s experience at Spamhaus gives her a very unique perspective beyond that of the traditional email marketer. She can easily identify bad practices, the consequences of making poor choices with list growth, and the dangers in neglecting appropriate authentication. Her answers are not only insightful, but actionable and well-worth a read.
How do you see email fitting into the marketing mix in 2025?
Well, it’s not going to die, so let’s just end that conspiracy theory.
If anything, email is going to grow. It has matured over the years with the dedication of individuals that want a better way to communicate to their clients. There is an industry of people that have studied the data of email, created more secure spaces, and developed filtering logic to zero closer to the spammers without catching everyone else in the same net.
One of the most valuable factors to email is the collaboration of knowledge over the last 20 years. It has moved from everything is part of a secret sauce (which no one can be trusted with this knowledge), to a community determined to work together to stop unwanted email and abuse as well as fine-tune legit marketers sending mail to their engaged users.
SMS will also grow as a right hand to email marketing and electronic communication. It still has a ton of maturing to do but has an industry to help it grow correctly.
The use of AI is already being explored, but it could be a very good tool to help with testing content to audiences and finding the sweet spot for messages that resonate.
Security, of course, will always be the ongoing struggle for email. Getting every sender adopt authentication, especially smaller brands, would be the olympic win if it happened by 2025.
