Picture courtesy of Marketingland
Email usage is rising, not falling. But, says Rob Martin, if you want to really engage your customers, keep the mails short, sweet and mobile friendly.
Rob Martin
There’s something about email isn’t there? No matter how often it’s written off as a communications tool, it always comes roaring back, stronger, more agile and more relevant than ever before.
Email is our business so maybe I am a little bit biased, but there can be no doubt that this medium seems to have nine lives, maybe even a whole lot more.
Email is embedded in big companies, it’s still by far the most effective way of reaching out to customers, about events, holidays, company milestones, successes and the rest.
Let’s say you have a customer called Kenneth, who happens to be a millennial (that’s a person under 35!).
Kenneth likes the personal connection, the feeling that the mails he gets are timely, relevant, informative and well, useful.
But, as the REM song goes, what’s the frequency?
Send too many mails and you run the risk of switching people off, send too few and you stand accused of not communicating with your people effectively.
Length
Length is important also. The mobile generation just won’t read long lumps of text. They want short, concise messages.
Kenneth does NOT want his inbox stuffed with overly-frequent, lengthy updates and newsletters that lack quality content.
He DOES want to check his mails in case he misses something. Some people call this FOMO. Fear of Missing Out.
Mobile use
According to a new study by digital marketing research division Adobe Digital Insights (ADI), email usage is on the rise. This increase is driven primarily by our shift to mobile and a growing ‘always on culture’ whether we like it or not.
According to the “Adobe Email Survey 2016,” carried out in the United States, our time on email has increased by 17 per cent year on year.
Here’s some key takeaways, as reported by ZDNet:
- Millennials spend the most time with email of any age group. 90 per cent of them rely primarily on their smartphones to access their emails.
- Almost 50 per cent of Millennials admitted to checking their email while still in bed in the morning.
- The survey found that smartphones have now overtaken computers for checking email.
- 21 per cent more respondents said that smartphones were their primary device to check work email, compared with last year.
- The study asked users how their use of email is changing. 30 per cent of respondents said they see a trend toward emails becoming shorter.
- 38 per cent of Millennials noticed the trend toward brevity. 72 per cent of respondents said they have used an emoji in a personal email, and 42 percent have used them in work emails.
So, what are the worthwhile learnings from all of this?
Email is clearly still super important, it’s alive and kicking, there’s life in the old dog yet. You get the picture!
Just don’t be complacent. Create concise content and email campaigns. Make sure your output is engaging, mobile-friendly and totally relevant.
Make Kenneth happy.