Recently I presented on digital marketing strategy to a group of venture backed companies and was surprised by one data point I uncovered in preparation. Compared to current growth rates across various marketing channels, email is the only one demonstrating growth. In a recent US Email Marketing Forecast Forrester Research predicts that double digit growth to continue for the next 5 years or so.

I dug a little deeper and found a bit of anecdotal evidence on the impact of social media on email consumption from The Nielsen Company. This seems to support the notion of higher email consumption by those engaged in social media.

This got me thinking about treating email with a bit more respect than it has received recently as a result of the attention drawn to the newer social media channels. I’ve also deployed social media strategy a few times now and know from my own experience that while social media can serve as an effective branding tool, using it for demand generation takes time and some “heavy lifting” – most notably by integrating communications across channels, including email.

There’s also another trend that makes direct marketing via email particularly attractive and that is the growth in mobile handset use to view email. Dating back to 2007 Marketing Sherpa data suggested that as much as 64% of emails were being viewed on mobile handsets, and mobile usage has only increased since then.

It’s striking then how many emails I receive on my Blackberry that are simply not viewable on the handset. And it seems that at least in North America, the Blackberry still owns the highest market share for “intelligent” handsets.

While I’ve always preferred text email to html for deliverability and for giving email communication a personal touch, I’ve grown to prefer simple text email over html for several reasons. I simply value the information in an email vastly more than the formatting of that email. Of course, email needs to be readable, but beyond providing a convenient link, I’m simply not a fan of heavily formatted html email, and I suspect this is where a lot of direct marketing programs fail to reach their target.

While there seems to be active debate about the best practices in email viewability – perhaps described best here by one of my favorite email marketing bloggers — I personally use my Blackberry to screen emails, so marketers who provide me a simple text version sans the html win my attention. I’ve even come across a few cool simulation tools, one from a European company called Opera, and one specifically for simulating email on the Blackberry. But, I still keep coming back to what I’d like to think is the best practice in marketing to mobile email viewers. That is, providing an 8pt font link at the very top of html email that simply reads “if you are viewing this email on a mobile device, click here.” Personally, when I click that link I hope I’ll be viewing a text email, and not a mobile version of a web page or html email. Of course, this all might mean that it’s just time for me to upgrade to a Droid, and with Christmas around the corner, who knows …