The social inbox of the future: implications for email marketers

Five minutes on Mashable or TechCrunch and you’re ready to retreat to the woods with a year’s supply of tinned food and a shotgun.

There’s only so much change you can take.

For email marketers, one area of important change is at the recipient end of the email marketing chain. Barely a day passes without an email heavyweight or software vendor announcing some new tool or feature to improve the functionality of the inbox.

There’s so much going on, it’s impractical to keep up. But I’m not sure you have to.

The implications of these inbox changes for our marketing efforts can be gleaned from an understanding of the wider issues behind these changes: unsurprisingly, the social web is the new factor in the rapid evolution of the inbox.

What’s causing change?

Social networks like Facebook and Twitter are incredibly successful, but a key constraint for them is reach. Not everyone is on Facebook, even fewer are on Twitter.

However, nearly everyone has an email address, which is one reason why email remains hugely popular and might be considered the original online social network. Social needs email.

Conversely, the big email players (like Google and Microsoft) can see eyeballs drifting to social applications. If they want to keep people on their webmail sites or using their software, they need social.

So what are the consequences?

This combined need to overcome the limitations of self-contained social networks and compete for audiences and attention results in:

• Social networks adding email features to their service (see, for example, Facebook’s proposed Project Titan)
• More tools supporting interaction between social and email (see, for example, this list of Twitter email tools or Inbox2)
• Webmail services adding social functionality to their inboxes (see, for example, Gmail’s Buzz)
• Growth of social add-ons and support in email client software (see, for example, Outlook’s Social Connector)

 

Put simply, the lines between email and social are blurring: we’re looking at the arrival of the so-called social inbox.

So does this have any implications for your email marketing? Here are three…

1. Reach the inner circle

Increasingly, our emails will no longer land in an email inbox, but in a communications hub: a genetically-modified super inbox. These emails share space with a wider variety of messages, many of which are highly targeted and personal.

As messages flood into social inboxes, the associated services will provide more and more tools to help sort, stream and prioritize those messages. Yahoo! Mail, for example, has a “Show” menu item that…

“…will allow you to view emails only from your Contacts or Connections”

It seems inevitable that “intelligent” inboxes will highlight “priority” messages, based on the user’s previous interactions with that sender’s messages or whether the recipient has some formal connection with that sender.

The inbox becomes an expert system, looking for signals that indicate an important email or one that can be safely ignored: is the sender in the recipient’s address book? Is the recipient a friend, follower, fan or contact of the sender?

High message volumes and intelligent message streaming have obvious implications. You need to:

• constantly work to raise the quality and value of your emails, as I’ve talked about before. User attention is scarce and value drives attention.
• ensure your messages are easily recognized.
• encourage interaction with your messages: consider alternative tactics to get people clicking even when the primary call-to-action is not of interest to them.
• put appropriate keyword text in your subject lines or message body so people can easily find your emails later with a search.
• work to establish formal connections with your subscribers: encourage them to whitelist you and “connect” through social sites.

The last reason may turn out to be an important incentive for developing a social presence.

Chris Penn, for example, reflects on Facebook’s forthcoming email service. Even if Facebook doesn’t restrict inbox delivery only to emails from the recipient’s Facebook connections, this particular quote remains very relevant:

“…start contacting your user base, your customer base, anyone you have permission to contact, and get them to become fans of your Facebook Fan Page.”

…not (just) because you want social media connections, but because these social connections increasingly look set to drive email marketing success, too.

2. Address new expectations

As social and email merges, then the expectations subscribers have of email will be influenced by what they get through social channels.

Social networks and social media are, by definition, largely about interaction (one-to-one and one-to-many), exchange, feedback, content, sharing, etc..

Traditionally, commercial emails…um…aren’t.

Time for a change in perspective?

This ties back into the idea of marketers as publishers, the need for interaction and the continuing importance of value: making your emails a richer experience and not just a stream of coupons.

The social influences in the inbox also strengthen the value of SWYN (Share With Your Network) links in emails.

Since emails are read in a decidedly social environment, recipients are more likely to turn to social sharing tools as a response to a message. SWYN links make perfect sense in that context.

3. Build trust to access functionality

Trust, of course, has always been key to broader email marketing success (and here are 22 ways to grow that trust).

If the inbox becomes a communication hub, then there is pressure on inbox providers and software manufacturers to allow more interaction within that inbox.

This pressure comes from those sending and receiving messages and from the inbox providers themselves: if people can watch videos, submit forms and complete other interactions from within a message, then they don’t need to leave the messaging environment.

And this is happening already.

We have, for example, Goodmail’s CertifiedVideo, which extends full video email functionality to AOL inboxes.

Goodmail and Gmail are also testing products that allow in-email transactions, among other features.

Given security concerns, however, such interactive functionality is likely to be limited to messages from trusted senders.

Indirect indications of such trust (e.g. low spam complaints, high percentage of recipient’s whitelisting the sender, authentication) might play a role in the long-term, but for the immediate future, this trust will likely need formal proof through some form of certification.

Email certification was traditionally seen as all about deliverability. Satisfy certain quality criteria to get certified and your email then has a better chance of reaching the inbox at whatever ISPs partner with the certification agency.

In the future, email certification may be as much about email functionality as about deliverability. That’s also already happening today. Only recently, Return Path announced that senders on their certification whitelist will have images and links turned on automatically at Yahoo! Mail inboxes.

The social inbox might oblige us to reconsider the costs and benefits of certification.

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose

Changing inboxes don’t so much change email marketing approaches as make existing needs more urgent.

Words like value, trust, interaction, relationships etc. are as old as email marketing. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

So there you have it: my vision of the email future. Do you agree?

Find related articles:

• Channel: Email and social media

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