Don’t ask “Is email dead?” – ask this instead…

By Mark Brownlow

I’m not an enormous fan of the “is email dead?” argument.

The Dodo is dead. Email isn’t. It’s not rocket science.

What annoys me about the debate (apart from the disingenuous and self-serving comments made by many participants) is that it deflects attention from more pressing matters.

It encourages the innocent marketer to think of marketing channels as mutually exclusive options…to think simplistically about email as “used” or “not used”.

We need to be more clever than that.

The whole debate comes about because of changes in online behavior and preferences. So the questions that we really need to ask are:

■ Is my audience changing its email habits?
■ Do I need to adjust my email strategy and tactics accordingly?
■ Should I invest more in email or is my money and time now better spent elsewhere?
■ Can I use email to support these other marketing endeavors (and vice versa)?
Nothing new there. We should be asking these questions regularly.

Asking questions is always easier than answering them, but there are three issues here that don’t get enough attention.

1. Changing habits
A lot of talk centers around whether email is used more or less. But there’s no volume control in your inbox.

Change is not really about volume, but about context and content.

The main context change is the growth of the mobile email challenge.

Nielsen recently reported that email is taking a greater share of mobile Internet time and the same company notes that smartphones are now 25% of the US mobile phone market. [More smartphone stats here.]

This trend changes:

■…when people see your email
■…where they get it
■…what they’re doing when they get it
■…what they do with it: while some are actively engaging with email on their mobile device, many (most) are sorting it out for later review at home or work.
…all of which potentially impacts what you send (and when) in ways we haven’t yet really explored.

This trend hasn’t reached critical mass yet, but at the least you should start to investigate mobile email use among your audience and how your email looks on mobile devices.

The content change concerns what email is used for.

Once upon a time it was more or less used for all online communication. Now many personal interactions have moved elsewhere, notably to social networks.

Email is currently shifting in profile toward communication for and with businesses. Studies regularly suggest that email, for example, is the preferred online channel for receiving commercial promotions and messages.

Many people are also dividing their email across different email accounts, with one account used solely for list subscriptions, another for personal email etc.

Most in the industry see it as a good thing that email remains the channel of preference for commercial messages.

I beg to differ.

Whether it’s good or bad surely depends on how much attention an email account gets.

If messages are going to an account free of personal email, then it might be going to an account that is no longer important. Or not.

It’s difficult for us to draw conclusions…except to be happy that commercial messages are indeed broadly welcome as email, assuming the recipient opted-in. (And maybe mobile email will give a new boost to personal email).

The challenge associated with this current content shift is to be a “valued message”. People don’t necessarily reject commercial messages in particular channels because they’re commercial. They reject them because they are unwanted, invasive and useless.

Adding value enables access and attention. It opens doors to channels other commercial senders are banned from. It gets your emails placed in the “important” email account and not the throwaway webmail one that gets checked once a month. And it gets attention in the inbox.

Here’s an interesting quote from Julie Waite, an email marketing strategist:

“Lately I am finding with my clients that educational, content-driven emails are out-converting promotional messages”

2. Preferences versus business value
As I pointed out last post, preferences are generally not exclusive.

Just because I prefer to get articles from websites via my feed reader doesn’t mean I won’t happily sign up for your content newsletter if a feed is unavailable.

People have preferences, which should be recognized, but not adhered to slavishly out of a misguided sense that preferring one channel means they automatically hate the others.

An important issue here is the value of a “subscriber” in different channels. And this is where email has an advantage (provided you’re landing in the right inbox!)

With most email, ending the relationship depends on the goodwill of the sender: will they honor the unsubscribe request? With Twitter, feeds, etc., the recipients are in control. I just take you out of my reader or “unfollow” you.

This user benefit means, normally, people “sign-up” to more streams of communication where they have more control. My reader has nearly 200 feeds in it, I follow 252 folk on Twitter, but I subscribe to maybe a dozen email newsletters.

Therein lies the beauty of email.

If you can get the email sign-up, thanks to the trust and value you offer, then you access a fairly small inner circle. An inbox is typically an ocean of tranquility in comparison to, say, a Twitter stream. For a more direct comparison of Twitter and email, see this post.

Preferences are, of course, important, but so is weighing up the costs and benefits of participation in each channel under consideration.

3. You don’t market to an amorphous blob
Of course, the members of your target audience don’t share the same preferences. Nor is all messaging suited to any one channel.

Again, the “is email dead?” debate lures us into an on/off, all or nothing mindset. The real world works differently.

The challenge is not to kill email or kill Twitter, but to find out which parts of the audience are best suited to which channel for which messages.

“Marketing” isn’t a single task. The messages can be promotional, informational, transactional, branding-related, invitational, urgent, non-urgent etc.

The question isn’t whether email is appropriate for marketing, but which of those marketing tasks is it best suited to. And for which audiences. It’s not all or nothing.

Perhaps some customer service can better shift to Twitter. Perhaps local deal alerts would do better as an SMS. Or not. That’s for each of us to explore and find out what works best for our unique situation.

Finding the right medium for the right message for the right audience has always been a key challenge in marketing.

We now have more messages, more media and a bigger, more diverse audience to access online. But the principle stays the same.

Email isn’t dead, it’s just changing. Agree?

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