Newsletter #79 Email - The Dying App

Created on 17/07/03

A special hello to all new subscribers. This article is on the Web at this address.

The last newsletter (14th May, 2003) was "The Scams Get Scarier". Sorry about the missing monthly newsletter, a holiday intervened!

Email is dying under the weight of spam and experienced users like Sean Carton of Carton Donofrio Partners are scrapping their old email addresses and "going underground".

In our article "The Spam Onslaught" in August last year I wrote that Brightmail estimated that spam accounted for 27% of all email. As of June this year their estimate is 48% with some high profile companies (and users no doubt) receiving nearly 80% of their email as spam. In fact another company MessageLabs put the percentage at 55.1% in May.

This means is that email is becoming increasingly ineffectual because:

• Messages have to compete with a deluge of email from spammers and may be overlooked or ignored
• As I said last August: "As more and more users filter their messages in an attempt to screen out the junk, more and more legitimate mail will be deleted by mistake."
• Spam reduces our tolerance of email in general - it's no longer fresh and inviting but another chore
• The risk of viruses is still high despite the use of Anti-Virus software

So where does that leave email which is still touted as the Internet's Killer Application in many quarters? It's on the decline and is already being superceded by other communication mediums, particularly in the youth and the professional sectors.

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USABILITY STUDIES - We offer cost-effective audits for Website owners looking to upgrade usability and therefore improve the returns from their Website. The only way of measuring of whether a Website meets your target audience's needs is to ask some of them! For more information www.netinsites.com/services/usability.cfm or reply to this email.

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Short Messaging Service (SMS) or texting is the dominating medium for those under 25. Apparently 17% of UK under-25ers have been dumped by SMS! In some European countries mobile phone ownership is over 80% and in most developed nations ownership hovers around the 50% mark. According to technology commentator Howard Rheingold, teens in Asia and Scandinavia have made the wireless ether a portable place of virtual intimacy. Specifically, they have even uncoupled their "presence" in the group from their physical presence.

London based Enpocket recently sponsored an independent survey that reviewed some 200 SMS promotional campaigns conducted from October 2001 to January 2003. 94 percent were read, generating a 15 percent average response rate and a 27 percent best response rate (added benefit: 23 percent showed or forwarded the message to a friend).

Spam has already raised its ugly head in this medium also. DoCoMo in Japan - many Asian countries are highly advanced in wireless services - has seen days during which 150 million pieces of spam were transmitted over its networks, to a subscriber base of 38 million. However it is difficult to see it becoming as big a problem as email spam as every text message costs money to send and wireless services tend to be local in nature - it's unlikely that you'll be spammed from Russia if you own a cellphone in the United States.

Instant messaging (IM) is another medium that has shown rampant growth over the past few years. See IM's Here, RU Ready? our article from last June for background. Osterman Research sees the IM landscape evolving from a relatively small arena, in which around 30% (June 2003) of business users are on IM, to a far larger market, with 92 percent of workers using IM in 2007.

What these mediums have in common are their immediacy and the ability for you to construct your own community or 'white list', thereby keeping out most unwanted approaches.

So where do we see things heading communications-wise and how can it help you?

• Back to the future - we recommend good old postal (or snail) mail for many marketing efforts. We find, and read many case studies of companies achieving great results by sending well-constructed direct mail. If you include something of value and personalise it, people will open and read it.
  
• Grab your customer's cellphone numbers and start building a database. We feel that there are many instances where SMS can successfully be used to alert customers when time is important. Some examples where SMS is being used:
  Many European airports have an SMS service that sends a message when the flight you are meeting lands.
  In tech circles SMS is commonly used to alert technical people when there is a problem that needs immediate action.
  SMS is being used to make micropayments or provide a level of authentication by providing passwords to online content.
  
• SMS is already being used in a highly successful way when younger people are the target market. For example:
  "Txt 'n Win" promotions where customers text a number to find out instantly whether they're a winner or not.
  Promotion-based campaigns or contests.
  
• Instant messaging will continue to catch on because you choose your 'buddy list'. It is your universe of friends or knowledge partners, unlike email that tends to be open to all. It is therefore a more pure communications channel that you can control.

Email, dying but is not yet dead, is no longer the answer to marketer's dreams. In this age of rapid technological advance, ways of communicating with friends and colleagues will continue to evolve.

We're thinking about turning out a paper-based version of this newsletter - what do you think?

Alex Garden

Newbies

Sometimes when browsing the Web you click on a link and nothing seems to happen. Often something is going on but it's taking a long time so how can you tell? On most browsers look to the top right of your screen. On Internet Explorer, a flag will slowly wave or turn into a revolving globe depending on your version. If nothing is happening at all, click on the link again.

For previous tips visit the Newbie Hot Tips page.

Power Users

A feature of IE5+ and later Netscape versions lets Webmasters design an icon that will appear to left of your site's title on the "favorites" menu and on the address bar, rather than the plain default logo. To take advantage of this, make an icon that describes your site in a graphics software program or visit www.favicon.co.uk. It will need to be 16x16 pixels in size so make it very simple eg. a single letter. Work in 256 colours only and export the finished image as a bitmap, say "favicon.bmp". Rename this as "favicon.ico". Transfer this file to your Website and then include the following tag between your "head" tags: <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.your_website/favicon.ico">. Visit any page on www.netinsites.com to see ours.

For previous tips visit the Power Hot Tips page.

If you're looking for a great inexpensive Personal Information Manager, why not just download the Palm Desktop (based on the legendary Palm Pilot)? It's free and you don't have to have a Palm device. With it, you can get a calendar, address book, to-do list, memos, note pads and there's even a Mac version. A note for dialup users - the download is around 15MB www.palm.com/us/support/downloads/

Filecourier is an alternative to sending large attachments via email by placing them on your computer and sending a link to download them from there. Large email attachments are often blocked by ISP or otherwise suspected of containing malicious material. The service at makes it easy for you to create a download link that redirects to your desktop PC, even if it
is behind a firewall. You can simply tag the file for upload, password it, and tell your intended recipient to get it from there. After a free trial, it's pay-as-you-go and costs US4 cents per MB of download. Note the service requires you to have a high-speed connection although you can send to those on a slower dialup connection. www.filecourier.com/

We've added a great new article to our database called 131 (Legitimate) Link Building Strategies. In this very comprehensive article a number of Search Engine Optimizers have got together to write an article that sets out the legitimate ways to improve the Link Popularity of your Website. Want to know more about Link Popularity? Go to www.netinsites.com and type the term into the Article Database search box on any page.

To search through all the articles in our online database use the search function on any page of our Website.

"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." Robert Wilensky

You can see our other Quick Quotes on the front page of www.netinsites.com; just refresh the page to see another one randomly selected from our database. Great for presentations or times when you want to appear to be a techno-dude(ss)!

To access previous newsletters visit our newsletter archive.

If you want to subscribe to this newsletter just visit www.netinsites.com and use the box at the top right.

Best wishes

Alex Garden

Internet Strategy | Website Design | Website Promotion | Web Text Messaging | Email Newsletters | Online Sports Games | Content Management