The Future of Email: Four Questions and Answers for 2018
Question 1: Email is always evolving. What
major change or innovation will alter how we email in 2018?
Better ways to deal with email
chaos.
Email is here to stay, and so is
the way most people use it. Unfortunately, the average white-collar employee
checks email about once every six minutes, and attention-switching resulting
from email interruptions is a productivity killer.
A study by the Danwood Group
found that it takes on average 64 seconds to recover from an email interruption
(regardless of the email's importance) and to return to the same productivity
level. Plus, when you add interruptions from real-time communications platforms
like Slack and others, people often feel overwhelmed and can stressed out by
the sheer number of incoming notifications and messages.
The biggest change in email will
come from recognizing the fact that people are bad at managing their emails,
and that trying to get them to change behavior won't solve the problem. For
example, people aspire to achieve "Inbox Zero," but few have the
discipline or time to do what's required to get there—yet alone stay there.
The key is helping people simplify and focus without making them
drastically change behavior. Innovative providers will make the entire email experience more intuitive and less demanding while
seamlessly dealing with increasing volume and complexity.
Integrating better search and
more advance AI functionality are steps in the right direction. As are smarter
and more easily customizable notifications that allow you to filter out noise
to focus on what's important, overlaying more order on what can seem like a
never-ending sea of chaos.
Question
2: In
relation to email, what will go away or become less relevant?
The clickthrough.
OK, maybe it won't disappear
entirely, and we're not there yet. But as more and more functionality gets
pushed into emails and people's inboxes, you won't need to click through to a
separate page to perform many tasks or consume additional content.
From embedded videos to surveys
and beyond, functionality that once required people to click through to landing
pages can be achieved within a person's inbox. This development may have
unintended consequences for marketers, who must then balance the value of
getting people to more easily engage against removing the incentive for
customers to visit their websites.
Question
3: What
role will video play in email?
The video email trend been
rumored for some time, but it's a trend whose time has finally come.
Apple's renewed commitment to
video support underscores that fact, and it means this huge segment of users
will continue to have videos play directly from email. However, just because
you can include video in emails doesn't mean you always should—and that goes
double for the ability to make an embedded video play automatically.
Although video content has proven
to be engaging, and auto-playing it even more so, the realities of how people
check email can raise some potential issues. That fact that many people
frequently check emails on their phones presents significant challenges. People
typically spend just seconds reading/scanning an email, which means any video
needs to prove watch-worthy in the first 3-5 seconds or it's going to be
deleted. And auto-playing a video when a person is checking email in a meeting
or another public place can cause problems. Some people may have their sound
turned off, in which case your carefully crafted video production becomes a
silent movie.
Video should be complementary to
the email's purpose, and its inclusion should be necessary; otherwise, video
for the sake of video is not a good approach. In short, it needs to add
something that can't be communicated in the form of static images.
Question
4: What
are some top tips for email marketers in 2018?
Tip
1: Interactive Emails
If you haven't already, start
looking for ways to start experimenting with interactive emails. There is no
single "right" approach, but you should make sure whatever
interactivity you add is appropriate for your brand and your customers.
Also, not every email needs to
have interactivity embedded. Keep it purpose-driven, and think of each as a
self-contained micro site that allows your customers to do something they find
interesting or valuable.
If done right, interactive email
is more convenient for the customer and will greatly improve engagement.
Tip
2: Dynamic Content Personalization
The promise of delivering truly
personal emails (or any other kind of communication for that matter) has always
bumped up against the reality of an organization's ability to deliver. It not
only takes a significant amount of data to know each individual customer, and
what they would find most relevant, but also a tremendous amount of effort to
define all the logic and content required to make the resulting emails seem
personal.
Better AI should allow more marketers to take steps toward realizing the potential of
personalization beyond the token greeting or account information.
Personalization should demonstrate you know your customers. However, doing so
effectively requires you to really understand what information they need and in
ways it can add value. It also requires you to be able to access that data and
incorporate it into your messaging. Which is no easy task.
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