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PETER GASCA
CONTRIBUTOR
Entrepreneur,
Startup Consultant
SEPTEMBER
03, 2015
Email is dead? Not so fast.
Ever since Facebook COO Sheryl
Sandberg made her highly visibly pronouncement that email was going away five
years ago, the debate about the usefulness and longevity of
email has raged. With new generations embracing new communication
tools and apps every day, there might just be a strong argument
that it could outlive its usefulness.
Like most debates around technology,
however, facts trump opinions.
Another recent study revealed
a positive trend in emails sent and email accounts created, with both estimated
to increase 8 percent and 19 percent respectively from 2014 to 2017.
Need more evidence? Consider a report released last week by Adobe
which looked into our email-consumption behavior. The study, which surveyed
more than 400 white-collar workers in the U.S., seems to indicate that
email is clearly not fading, and indeed our addiction to email may never have
been stronger. Consider the following statistics about respondents’ behavior
around email:
·
70 percent check email while
watching TV
·
50 percent check email in bed
·
50 percent check email while on
vacation
·
42 percent check email while in the
bathroom (also known as the second office)
·
43 percent check email while on the
phone
·
18 percent check email while driving
·
Respondents spend six hours per day
checking email
I definitely fall into these
categories -- each one of them.
Of course, this is good news for
marketers who have struggled to find a way to reach consumers in the
ever-changing-technology and content-consumption landscape. Marketers should
not, however, rush out and press that "send" button to their
distribution lists just yet.
Patrick Tripp, senior
product marketing manager for Adobe Campaign, an
email-campaign-management system for businesses, states that while consumers
are still using email, data shows that they are very selective about how
they use it.
·
28 percent of consumers are annoyed
to have to scroll through emails
·
24 percent are annoyed with the
layout not being optimized for mobile
·
39 percent want to see fewer emails
in general
And interestingly:
·
58 percent say that email is their
preferred way to be contacted by a brand, but
·
32 percent say they want fewer
repetitive emails from the brands with which they have relationships
With no historic numbers to compare,
it is difficult to draw a conclusion about the trend in consumer preferences,
but when you consider that almost one third of all respondents used email but
had some issue with the format and content, marketers would be wise to take
notice and adjust their strategies accordingly.
Before you swap your email-marketing
strategy for a Snapchat strategy, consider these tips to get more benefit from
your email campaigns.
1.
Be mobile ready.
More people are consuming
content via a handheld smart device, so email marketers should
consider a "mobile first" strategy. In fact,
all components of your email campaign -- from the email itself to the linked
landing pages to the virtual checkout carts -- need to be mobile ready to
assure a seamless experience.
2.
Remember that less is more.
Though consumers are using email,
they do not want to be inundated by it. Be
respectful with their time, add value to their days and
never send an email that does not make your customer’s life better in some way.
3.
Let consumers set their pace.
Never make it feel like you are
trying to manipulate the consumer to get
contact information. Make it painfully easy for consumers to set
their email options, including times and frequency. Also, ask for an
occasional "re-opt in," which will clear out your
email list while build trust with your loyal customers.
4.
Personalize and add value.
As the Adobe study demonstrated, 58
percent of consumers want to be contacted by their favorite brands -- that is
six in 10 customers who are giving you permission to send them an email. So how
do you become one of the brands they want to hear from? More important, how do
you avoid having that permission rescinded?
The answer is to add value by
providing useful content through personalized email campaigns using data and
contextual information about your audience to help craft the right
message, at the right time, to the right place (email address).
Consider, for example, that most
business professionals have a business and a personal email account (sometimes
more). Instead of sending one email to multiple email addresses several days a
week, you should be targeting specific addresses based on your customer’s
unique online behavior, perhaps using contextual data, such as location and
weather.
Also, we spend much time talking
about the “right time to send an email,”
but the Adobe data shows we are consuming data at all times of the day. If you
knew when your customer was in bed or in his "second office," you
could better target delivery when they are reading email.
According to Adobe, "We know
from data on actual site visits and conversions tracked within the Adobe
Digital Index that loyal visitors who spend more and convert at higher rates
are twice as likely to come from email than from the average channel."
That doesn't sound like email is
dying.
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