The power of #email

A week ago i published a provocative statement with connected survey: #Email is dead.

Something very interesting came up: 11% of responders agree that email is dead.

I have always been curious about what other people think and their point of views, and this is the same approach I used for this survey. I realized that my initial thought regarding email, was from a pure marketeer point of view. Reading the comments and seeing people agreeing and disagreeing with the survey opened my perspective much more (and I understand why some people agreed that email is dead).

Let's go back in time a little bit.

I set up my first email address in 1997/1998, it was with #lycos (followed by #freemail, then #tin or #virgilio, eventually #yahoo, but each of those email addresses didn't last that long). At that time i was still in Italy. For us (Italians) was the very very early stages of the internet (i remember i could only connect from University cause connecting from home was extremely slow and very very expensive).

In 2005 i won a scholarship and i got the opportunity to participate to an exchange program (Erasmus) where i spent a year at University of Plymouth (UK). It was during that summer that i met a Chinese guy from Beijing (Charles, my classmate) that gave me one of the very first invites to register with #googlemail (eventually #gmail). (Today this sounds quite odd, but I believe back in 2005 Google wasn't banned in China, or at least not completely, and probably the #BAT were still quite far from where they are today).

Since then 16 years are gone and today I am still using exactly that email address on a daily basis.

Since 1997 many "email is dead" articles have been published. And there have been several key events that i still remember highlighting the death of email. Even before i was accepted for my Master at UCL (2007) one of the key questions I was asked was: "what is one of the biggest challenges we are facing in the digital world?". I remember after a careful research one of the top priorities that needed to be addressed (back at that time) was #EmailSpam... and many articles were considering spam as the stage preceding email's death. If i well recall someone was also supposing that email would be replaced by RSS feeds.

During the last ten years, conflicting articles regarding "email is dead" and "email is the new channel" have been regularly published. We are still reading these articles pretty often.

The thing is: email is still alive... and probably still here to stay.

The way people think about email depends on how they are using it and what their main focus is when thinking about email: in my opinion, as a marketeer, email is extremely important, it is key, especially looking at the near future when third party cookies will be completely deprecated (think about people based marketing, customer match in Google and Facebook, CDP, etc....) so i think and I hope i will never die. As a user, i still need email for many purposes: sending documents, official documents (PEC), etc... Email became a kind of official document, a kind of passport... it is personally identifiable information. And nowadays we stick with the same email address much more compared to 20 years ago... at least I do :)

Maybe things slightly change according to the age or professions. Maybe some companies don't use email as much as before as they are using other collaborative platforms... but this could be pretty much for internal purposes only; and also one could think that the new generations don't use email anymore as they communicate in a much faster way and email is too slow... actually "90% of internet users between 15-24 years old in the USA use email" (Statista, 2021). Additionally "more than 60% of customers (those 25 or older in particular) would prefer to be contacted by brands via email" according to Adobe “Email Use 2017 – US Report“ (2018). All this info is extremely interesting, and there is much more around.

From a marketeer point of view there are also additional advantages in order to keep using email: email has one of the highest ROI; email is also a free channel for communicating with your customers.

As a marketeer I can mentioned several success cases of using email for marketing purposes across the years and how I leveraged email in different ways and I am sure there will be even more in the future. Just to give a few examples: in 2006 email addresses of customers, massively helped me to achieve great results. I used email addresses for marketing/crm purposes and used the basic metrics of email marketing in order to gather insights and whenever a customer would open my email I would immediately follow up with a phone call. Most of the times i would close a deal on the phone; in 2010 while at Yahoo we worked on a product called Consumer Connect (that would allow to measure the impact of online advertising on offline sales). Again here email addresses were some of the key data points in order to match online with offline behavior; from 2016 (maybe slightly earlier!?) Google and Facebook allow Brands to leverage email addresses for targeting / insights / measurement purposes (Customer Match); from 2017 customer data platforms (CDP) are massively leveraging email addresses as well.

We can clearly see with these few examples why email still very important from a marketeer point of view. At the same time email still relevant for individual users for the reasons mentioned above (only mentioned a few of those).

Conclusions (from a marketeer): my survey was provocative. It is pretty clear that email is not dead. Email is here to stay instead, and is getting more importance especially in consideration of third party cookies deprecation and people based marketing getting more relevant. More and more players (brands, publishers, vendors) are putting (trying to put) their hands on first party data (probably the easiest one is email address) and this is quite important in order to make sure to still be part of the game.