Nobody ever said that email marketing was an easy game. Keeping up with new trends in this very dynamic field can be tough and 2011 certainly delivered its own share of challenges that might re-define the act of emailing, even for the everyday sender.

1. The rise of the Priority Inbox

For the well-wired, inboxes are slammed with dozens or sometimes hundreds of messages a day making it time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and replied.

This year, webmail clients Gmail and Hotmail added a Priority Inbox. This feature automatically identifies important emails and separates them from everything else to help users focus on the content that matters to them the most. You can also mark certain senders as priority by teaching Google to interpret your mail properly by clicking the “mark as important” or “mark as not important” buttons.

The Priority Inbox is like a personal assistant, helping you see and read the messages that are important without requiring you to set up your own complex filtering rules.

Many a campaign saw dips in its open rates for Gmail and Hotmail and marketers had to try new tactics to improve their relevancy and personalization — helping ensure that their emails stayed in the “urgent” section.

The Priority Inbox has been a benefit to honest emailers; ensuring that prime position goes only to those who can really touch their subscribers and encourage them to continue reading and interacting with their email marketing campaigns.

 2. Forget Santa… HTML5 video came to town

Christmas came early as HTML5 video rendering made its way to email, with Hotmail being the first major webmail provider to allow video displays in emails as a part of its 2011 beta client.

Before Hotmail’s support for HTML5 video, we could only deliver HTML5 videos in email to iOS devices and some other less prominent email clients, which made for an unimpressive email video penetration rate.

The HTML5 breakthrough has been big news. Incorporating video into emails — a simple enough concept — wasn’t even possible two years ago.

According to a Forrester report, promotions via embedded videos improves click-through rates by two to three times.

Promising as this sounds, there’s a catch. Proper rendering of HTML5 videos is dependent on the web browser used by a subscriber. More recent versions of Chrome and Firefox, and Internet Explorer 9 support HTML5. Earlier versions do not.

The result is that in-email videos are still more of a prospect than a practice, but one promising thought is that we can certainly expect other major webmail clients to warm up to this feature if it does prove to be more than just an experiment for Hotmail.

3. The (slow) descent of Spam

If you want any chance of delivering a worthwhile return on investment, you need to take a solid shot at your end-reader; and nothing shrouds the road to success quite as much having your mailer marked as spam.

Let’s face it: spam doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. Bad email begins with bad senders, and so 2011 saw the emergence of a new major piece of anti-spam legislation; the Canadian Anti-Spam Law (CASL) - which has yet to come into effect, but is the most restrictive anti-spam law in the world.

The new rules will require express opt-in consent from recipients. Exemptions to the opt-in requirement exist under certain circumstances of implied consent — if, for instance there is an existing business relationship or legitimate non-business relationship, such as family.

CASL’s anti-spam provisions looks set to have pronounced effects on next year’s marketing strategies since it extends to various forms of electronic communication; such as text messages, instant messaging and social media messaging – unlike the CAN-SPAM Act which applies only to email marketing anti-spam policies.

GraphicMail's original article was first published on Memeburn.