2012 Is Not the End of the World for Email

Dave Hendricks

Tuesday, December 20, 2011 A lot happened while you were out.

Fueled by PR teams and deadline pressures, the annual crop of crystal ball ‘predictions for’ articles fills a strange societal need to be fundamentally wrong about the future, in writing.

It doesn’t matter how wrong these articles ever are, no one keeps score, so we keep writing them, and here I am writing one now. The difference: mine is right.

2012 is going to be the year of email.

Why? It’s really because of two other ‘Big Things’ that have been the focus of ‘Year End’ predictions: social messaging and smartphone adoption. Email is a major part of both.

Social media is the first ‘Big Thing’ that depends on email more than ever. Between Twitter, Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga, the social space has clearly dominated our attention of late. These companies have all discovered that the best way to deliver the number of unique visitors and page views to support their operations is to use email notifications to drive site traffic.

US Online Email Usage Compared with Twitter and Facebook

The second ‘Big Thing’ is the smartphone. As of August, something special happened: smartphones started outselling ‘feature phones’ in the US. And the gap is widening. With more than 81 million smartphones in the US, this means that all of these people have HTML email readers – many able to read HTML 5 – on their phones, within an arms-length pretty much 24/7. And according to comScore, the number one thing these smartphone owners are doing with their devices is reading email – more than any other activity, including voice calling, texting, social media, gaming or music.

A recent study by The Relevancy Group, led by Forrester’s former lead email analyst Dave Daniels, found that email use on smartphones is significant among all age groups: The Relevancy Group found that, “overall, 39 percent of consumers ages 13 and older check their personal email each day on their mobile device. This number soars when we zero in on key age groups, such as 27 to 32 year olds (66 percent) and 33 to 38 year olds (52 percent). Ensuring that not just your email renders appropriately on the small screen but also your landing pages and website is a top priority for email marketers.”

The reemergence of email didn’t just happen; these developments have been in the works for a long time. And true to form, many entrepreneurs saw this coming some time ago. As a result of their prediction in the tech world’s version of the Chinese Zodiac the next year would be ‘The Year Of Email,’ we now have some very cool emerging technology platforms harnessing the default app of the internet and smartphone.

Not surprisingly, a significant number of these email-centric startups can be found in New York, a city where it’s safe to walk down the street with your head buried in your smartphone at no risk other than bumping into someone else doing the same thing.

Marketfish, led by David Scott, is a recent transplant to NYC from Seattle, WA. Marketfish is a 100 percent self-service lead generation platform that offers access to big brand, permission based email marketing lists. Marketfish CEO, David Scott, explains, “Through our innovative, automated

platform, an advertiser can target an audience, as well as build and execute a direct marketing campaign, all in under thirty minutes.”

Another local NYC startup is helping publishers increase page views while streamlining their email marketing operations. Sailthru, led by Neil Capel, doesn’t just send email, they also provide article recommendations for a newsletter’s subscribers by analyzing reading habits and making suggestions. According to Amy Fitzgibbons, Director of Marketing, Sailthru’s publishers see a 15 percent increase in email opens and a 60 percent increase in article CTR.

Movable Ink, located at General Assembly in NYC, is focusing on the real-time market. According to Movable Ink, they are a revolution in email marketing. According to CEO Vivek Sharma, they “enable marketers to make emails as dynamic and real-time as a web page, something that has never been possible before. Emails become containers for live content that can personalize to current time, recipient's location, social context, and other business rules."

Why all of a sudden has email gotten hot? It’s not a sudden development. You’ve been part of it morning, noon and night, just maybe as a spectator. As a publisher or an advertiser planning for 2012, you should take another look at your plan and ask yourself “how can I find a way to get my product into the palms of every hand with a phone”?

I predict with confidence that if you expand your use of email in 2012, your business will only benefit.

Dave Hendricks is COO of LiveIntent.

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