ADOTAS — Despite yearly death notices, email is stable and seeing an uptick.

Marketing Sherpa charted email marketing from 2001, tracing the relationship between email practice and email success as marketers looked for low cost ways of reaching their target markets, retaining customers and hitting their quarterly goals.

By 2004, according to Marketing Sherpa, two groups begin to diverge - best practices and non-best practices - and marketers find that they have to provide value, think about relevance and pay attention to their email programs to see continued increase in its impact. Every year the gap grows, as those who fit a ‘best practices’ model (a definition which evolved over the years based on tracked metrics) report stable or improving impact for email, while those still batching and blasting see diminishing returns.

Source: http://www.adotas.com/2009/08/email-best-practices-proves-durable/