Don’t Tell Me You Still Use Email?

We all know that e-mail is dead…right?

The polling question was straightforward (for a change), with not a lot of room for interpretation:

“How do you prefer to be contacted by businesses? For the sake of clarity (I’ve learned), let’s assume these are businesses and products that you are interested in, not spam.”

And as always, my usual weasel caveat…this is not scientific and not representative; ergo, not projectable. Don’t bet all your Bitcoin on its outcome, although I would gladly bet the outcome would win over the Bitcoin.

OK…snarky Bitcoin comment, check. Now we can move on.

And as always, I direct all my readers to the comments. That’s where the meat is. That’s where the insight and learnings are. And, so, what did we learn?

65% of respondents would rather be contacted by e-mail in the above scenario. It was an overwhelming number as the closest competitor was Phone/Text at 18% (a hated second if you read the comments), and the third was Ads.

Ergo, a “dead method of communicating” according to the analysts and pundits beat all others. I might point out that those same folks bury and re-bury PCs every couple of years, and no doubt you all read about Snap's foray into desktop…not to mention shopping and such. 

What do the comments tell us beyond e-mail?

• “E-mail wins the vote? I find that the response from emails is negligible.” —CQ
• “Don’t call me…I’ll call you.” —MM
• “Phone. Just voice.” —MH
• “Personal intro.” —EK
• “A bouquet of roses and a $100 gift certificate.” —ASK
• “I prefer not to be contacted at all.” —JY

And the one that I really love from BG: “Give me a valuable content channel, and I’ll subscribe.” 

And BG, I believe that content channel can be email—when, like everything else, it's used properly. 

E-mail is over 50 years old. It’s hard to believe, no? That’s a lifetime or more. It was birthed in a world of no PCs, iPhones, MACS, Twitter, Snapchat, or TikTok; not even Facebook. And, while other channels seem to ebb and flow in popularity, email gains users every year. 

Email is like the Tortoise if you will, growing at a steady 3% with over 4 billion users and way more accounts as many of us have more than one.

By way of comparison, that’s over a billion more users than Facebook. Imagine now if they had kept that proprietary instead of open! 

KNEE JERK ALERT…I get it, I was making a point. 

4 billion people—communicating, sharing, buying, selling, logging on to the “real” channels like Netflix and Twitch…in short, using a dead medium on a daily/multiple-use basis. 

No doubt, some of you assume that the users I’m speaking about are 4 billion old folk, like me. Wrong. Just looking at the US tells us via Census Data that from the measured age of 15 and on, 90%+ of all age demographics are users. And gender is in the same ballpark, an equal 90%. 

And the beat goes on. Business mail outstrips consumer mail today, but consumer mail has a higher growth rate…double, in fact. 

Open rate is a critical measure with Advertising having the lowest (my guess is most folks don’t pay attention to what they send), and Arts and Entertainment joining Government in the highest category. 

Gmail and Apple Mail (iPhone) are neck and neck for the market lead, with all others far behind. 

Needless to say, META is all over this…they shared a WhatsApp Business Platform announcement in May that predicts it will eclipse email and send it to the trash heap of business communication history (my words). They say 65% of users prefer messaging, or as Meta V-P Matt Idema put it, “Our research shows that 7 out of 10 people feel more connected to a business they can message, and over 65% of people said they actually prefer messaging over email and phone.”

Dear Reader, I always refer you to anecdotes, stories, and similar occurrences in the past in the passionate belief that new is never exactly that.

There is a lot to learn from what was in terms of what is and what might be. 

I’ll keep this one simple. Study the story of New Coke. Blind taste-testing showed that people preferred Pepsi. It was sweeter…get it? Coke looked at the data and changed its formula to near disaster. 

Lesson…don’t ditch your email yet because 65% of uncontextualized data, from a study by Meta, points to its final end (works well for analysts, though).

What does this all mean?

You tell me…

Amazon continues to open stores.

Netflix is launching commercials.

Maverick killed in theaters.

And email continues to grow. 

• People First. Ditch the “follow-the-lemmings” analysts. 
• Old and dead are not synonymous. 
• If it works for many and not for you, I’d wonder what I was doing wrong…not what was wrong with it. 
• Test. Experiment. Try. 
• Innovation means just that. You can innovate with old and new. 
• When in doubt, run from DIGIBABBLE.

KNEE JERK (SECOND) ALERT…this isn’t really a post about email. Not at all. It's a post about our need to think and analyze critically. 

What’s your view? And you can message, Slack, IM, DM, smoke signal, or semaphore them to me. Whatever works for you!