Is email dying?

The question is raised in consumer and corporate circles. Marketing email click rates are falling, consumers have a wealth of other options to communicate with their friends. The big social networks have they own ‘inbox/emailing’ solutions (Facebook, Linkedin, etc…). Let’s look at this.

The early signs of a crisis often start with the young generations changing habits. What do they do so differently ? They use the Internet more than they watch TV (in Europe). They are addicted to Facebook and MSN Live – they prefer status sharing and chat.  Some use Twitter a lot. Or SMS. What would you need email for ? Ok, sometimes you want to be sure about who’s reading or keep it practical, so you send something with the old fashioned tool.

The other signs are to be seen with the falling click rate of email marketing actions. As the number of personal emails has decreased, the amount of email marketing largely increased. Every time you shop through a different store, sign up for a service, etc… you get into a list. With a tenure of 7 or 8 years of Internet usage, your inbox starts looking like a commercial folder.  No wonder that emails get less opened, and less clicked on. And I am not even talking about click-to-buy conversion rates.

Last, there is spam, which is plaguing the application even further. It now accounts for over 80% of total email traffic. What a waste of energy & time for everyone. It is one of the reason why Facebook is promoting its own email service – there is just no spam into it.

Funnily enough, corporate emails are still growing. Companies are so much in love with emails that I receive complaints from corporate managers receiving 400-500 emails a day. Slightly too much. But guess what ? The number of hours in a day is unlike your disk storage: it’s limited. So people have built their strategy to cope with it: ignore, filter, delete, read randomly and hope (not effective).

In both the consumer and corporate situations, you end up with a problem: email does no longer fulfill its promises, to connect with people, boost productivity and foster collaboration. It seems that it somehow was extremely useful at some point but not anymore.

It’s a pity because email is the first application of the Internet. First, historically, as smtp (the simple mail transfer protocol and de facto global Internet standard) was invented before http – which helps you browsing -  in 1971 according to Wikipedia. And it is still relevant in terms of volume: email still takes a top share of total traffic, albeit most of it is spam. And more fundamentally, it does fulfill a role or having a central hub, not owned by a single company, to reach virtually anyone, read and react to what people sent to you.

But really, it needs to be re-invented. So, who is there to invent email 2.0 ?

Well, I don’t know what email 2.0 is (I would be rich), but for me it would need to have some of those characteristics:

• Be social : for each email, it would be good to know how many of friends/followers/colleagues opened it, read it and liked it, and see their comments
• Be tailored: it would be tailored to my needs and preference. Example: it would automatically separate the marketing stuff vs the rest.
• Be multi-sites: it would integrate what matters to me on all my sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, ecommerce site, etc…) and grab the information I need, summarize it, and deliver it at the time I want it (e.g. daily end of the day)
• Be multi-forms: for instance, endless discussions could get promoted into a wiki or discussion boards, only followed by relevant people, in a click
• Be smart: based on my reading and classification habit, it would automatically add signature of emails into contact book, find out priority emails, suggest me what to read next (eg. client mails vs rest), clearly show where I am in cc vs to (or even better: group all ‘cc:’ emails I receive and put a summary somewhere), etc…
• Be productivity-driven: for instance, it could force me (or propose me) to act on one of the 4 D’ for each email I read: Do, Delete, Delay, Delegate.
• Be educational: it would help me target relevant audience and only that, to avoid unintentional spamming

A lot of this is probably available on the market, or possible using existing tools (eg. filtering), made by techies for other techies. But I am waiting for the company that can do all of it in a very simple and intuitive way, and maybe an underlying standard to support it. Future entrepreneurs, please share a dime with the author when you do your IPO.

In the meantime, for marketers? Get some help from email marketing specialists, to ensure you target the right audience with smart messages at an appropriate pace.  Tailor your messages.  Ask for permission.  Make your content relevant by making it directly useful (e.g. tips and trick on a topic). Make your emailing social, by enabling a two-ways dialogue with your consumers in a Web 2.0 community, not just a simple push. This significantly boost emailing opening and click-rate, as shown by a survey in the US.

What would you like email 2.0 to be like ?  What do you suggest we do before it’s there ?