Email’s Last Stand
Last time I wrote about the fact that email has, in some respects, become the new direct mail. That’s because email marketers, with increasing frequency, are using such tactics as concept testing, list segmentation, and communications triggered by customer actions – all borrowed from the direct mail world.
But even as email marketing is becoming more effective, there’s a predator lurking around the digital corner. eMarketer reports that “according to Nielsen Online, more people in the US and other leading digital countries worldwide are using social networks and blogs than email.”
Darren Waters, the technology editor for BBC News, interviewed David Sacks, who founded Yammer, a business-oriented social network. Sacks told Waters: “We are all in the process of creating email 2.0… It’s no coincidence that these products [social networks] are all looking like email.” Ari Steinberg, an engineering manager at FriendFeed, told BBC News: “You used to email content to people and you had to choose who you wanted to email it to… Now you can passively put something out there and let people engage with it.”
Couple the comments of Sacks and Steinberg with a new report from database marketing agency Merkle, “View from the Inbox 2009, (pdf)” and you can see that the sands may be shifting for email. Merkle’s research study, conducted by Harris Interactive, found that, while time spent by consumers with permission (opt-in) email gained last year, it “stabilized” this year; in other words it didn’t go up. Here’s the real problem for email, though:
“The biggest reasons subscribers choose to opt-out of permission email continue to be lack of relevance (cited by 75%), followed closely by sending too frequently (73%),” says Merkle.
When you cross the trajectory of blogging and social media with the gradual decline in email, you begin to see a potential upheaval on the horizon. Direct mail may never completely disappear. Email may never completely disappear, either – certainly not in the business world, or for consumers who need to send attachments. But it seems we are in the midst of a large and significant directional change in the way people want to communicate over the Internet. Blogging, along with Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and a host of other social networks, are fun and engaging. They’re also harbingers of the future – a future none of us, even committed email users, can ignore.
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Barry Silverstein is a freelance writer/marketing consultant and co-author of the McGraw-Hill book, The Breakaway Brand.
