The email experience: what is it and how can you benefit?

David Baker is a thoughtful fellow and always a provoking read. In this new article, he invites us to step back a little and review our email efforts in the context of the consumer email experience.

Do you understand the chaotic, attention-poor, spam-ridden inbox, and are you managing your emails to ensure they do the right job for your brand and business objectives?

David has five specific points he'd like you to go away and think about.

One of these is the idea of managing the first impression. A concept explored in more depth by Anna Billstrom in this blog post.

She describes an initial email communication package that should "...educate and engender loyalty in the early interactions that the customer has with your site." She goes into some detail, describing each individual email in terms of content, timing, segmentation and required data.

All of which may become redundant if Anne Holland's stepson is to be believed. His online behavior suggests the younger folk are email agnostics and email's popularity may shrink as the growth of alternative online modes of communication grow.

Fortunately for email marketers, an aversion to emails tends to disappear as soon as people get a job ;-) And if one report is to be believed, 50% of 25- to 34-year-olds in Britain feel "they could not carry on" without email.

Though I can't see hordes of despairing youngsters heading for the cliffs of Dover because Gmail is down, it seems email is (so far) (still) pretty indispensable.

More on strategy | Tags: email marketing, email trends

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