Here, from Loren McDonald of Silverpop, an ‘engagement marketing’ firm, is a good stab at email trends we might see in 2011.

I’d especially draw attention to his last four points … each relevant for nonprofit communicators and fundraisers:

Social and mobile become important sources of opt-ins for email programs. As email’s role changes, savvy marketers will see that social and mobile attract a new group of engaged customers and will seek to add these followers, friends and influencers in those channels to the email channel where conversion and nurturing of relationships may be more likely to occur.

Retention and engagement become a huge focus. Most email marketers now cite list churn as their single biggest challenge and will increasingly focus on reengaging the one-third to one-half of their database that has likely gone inactive. However, with most reactivation programs only having very modest success, marketers will turn to focusing on minimizing list churn and inactivity in the early stages of the email relationship. Welcome, “early-warning” tracks and triggered messaging programs become key initiatives.

Email marketing increasingly becomes a “dynamic content platform.” With many Web sites incorporating product review, recommendation and personalization technologies, email marketers will increasingly incorporate this content into their email messages. Using APIs, email content is dynamically pulled from these various technologies and content platforms, delivering more personalized and relevant messages to each recipient.

Significant increase in the use of marketing automation features. The broadcast or “batch and blast” email is far from dead. But … marketers must increasingly rely on technology to deliver more relevant messages at the right time, but with fewer resources. I expect to see a large increase in use of tools like triggered messaging, and nurturing of programs driven by engagement scores and multiple message tracks.

The first two of these are simply smart steps any email campaigner can take. The second two require a bit of technical and database sophistication … for the nonprofits out there with the requisite skills and resources, worth the effort to master the techniques.

Tom