Email Marketing, an industry on the defensive

A few days ago, watching one of the lectures made public by Litmus last week at #TEDC2014 (Thank you, Litmus), we heard an argument that caught our attention. At the conference Kevin Mandeville and Jason Rodriguez pointed out that The email marketing industry is always on the defensive, which is a major drag on innovation and progress in the industry. 

What they mean by this statement is that email marketers we design the most popular emails on the basis of the constraints that the different email clients offer us, rather than taking advantage of what some of them do allow us to do. For example, if Gmail still does not support the tag and therefore the responsive design in our emails, we opt for a non-responsive design that works correctly in all clients, losing this opportunity for innovation and progress. This only ceases to be the case when it is demonstrated that the result obtained with the innovation compensates for the sacrifice. In other words, when the limitations are very minor and the innovation provides a clear advantage. Now that mobile opening accounts for more than half of the total, and given the growing use of smartphones, this is already happening with responsive email design, but we continue to see it with other techniques that remain limited in many email clients, for example, the use of video, background images, certain CSS rules, etc.
It is easy to understand that this is because email marketing is driven by results, but it is also true that we are often "afraid" and do not take certain risks, not seeing the possible positive results of innovation. We must encourage this innovation to move the sector forward and avoid situations similar to what happened with responsive email design, which compared to the web sector, arrives to email with years of delay, with poor support in some inboxes and still without a majority use by companies. However, we are aware that this innovation requires a great deal of effort, given that it is not just about using new techniques, but about offering a decent fallback on those providers without adequate support.
And the question we ask ourselves is: if we took a risk and gave the industry a boost, would email clients respond by better supporting new techniques? For the time being, Gmail continues to ignore the demands of the sector with regard to responsive design.