Great article. Email marketing has always had the highest conversion for a variety of reasons - it's permission marketing, it's easily customized, easily trackable, easy to share....(check out the full list and explanations on Quora : http://bit.ly/1xTGCo5) On top of that add the big data predictive analytics on it and conversions are already 4-20 times higher than on any other channel. It makes sense for @Pay to capitalize on emails success.

However, a fundamental element to @Pay's success depends on retailers being able to serve their customers exactly the products they want at the best time. For example, if a customer just bought a grill you'd want to recommend grill accessories and charcoal in the email as soon as possible. You wouldn't recommend a book (unless it's a grilling book) to that customer, nor would you make a recommendation for grill accessories 3 months after the customer purchased the grill. In both cases, not only would the customer not click through your email, you risk annoying the customer with the irrelevancy of the email. (Read a case study of how Traeger Grills used predictive analytics to optimize their email : http://bit.ly/1sKFnHe.)