Canada Day 2014: Time to Move On from E-mail Advertising

This July first in Canada was not only a holiday but the start of a new anti-spam law. Now messages must be e-mailed only to consenting people and companies. Will this change the amount of spam Canadians receive? Probably not for several reasons: 1) Unless the recipient reports the offending spam it will continue to be sent. 2) The amount of spam is astronomical and impossible for any country to control 3) Most importantly - e-mail is now "old technology" with social media in various forms taking over and instant messages being faster than e-mail anyway. E-mail has already been replaced. I personally have younger relatives that rarely check their e-mail.

In a recent article written by Leah Eichler entitled, "E-mail has had it day. It's time to move on", she agrees with this point of view that e-mail is now passe and not as useful. Here is part of her article.

E-mail can be described as the “grandfather” of workplace productivity tools, but today, most of us experience a love-hate relationship with it. I can’t stop checking my e-mail accounts but then I take so much delight in deleting incoming messages that I often purge my inbox of important e-mails.

There are 108.7 billion e-mails sent and received a day, according to Radicati, a technology market research firm, and the majority of traffic comes from business accounts. They also report that the number of worldwide e-mail users is expected to grow from over 2.5 billion in 2014 to over 2.8 billion in 2018.

The average employee spends 40 per cent of his or her time dealing with internal e-mails that have little to no impact on their business. Think about that next time you scroll through your inbox, feeling harassed because you have too much to do in too little time. The productivity losses are nothing short of astronomical.

To read more click on this link.

So what is replacing e-mail? For those of us with smart phones (and even some "dumb" phones), instant messages is the way - faster and not so wordy. No quotations, no long paragraphs with useless information. However, not everyone embraces mobile devices.

Enter social media. There are an incredible number of forms and types, all that have appeared in the last 10 years. If Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LikedIn, Google+, Pinterest and StumbleUpon were not enough, there is Delicious, Digg, MySpace, Bebo, Mister-Wong, Reddit, Wanelo, Orkut, Xing, Buffer, Evernote, Pinboard, VK, Springboard, Buffer, Flipboard, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Arto, Plurk, Deaspora, Blogger Post, TypePad Post, Box.net, Kindle It, Baidu, Netlog, CiteULike, Jumptags, Netvouz, Diigo, Bib Sonomy, Blog Marks, StartAid, Khabbr, Memeame and Yoolink. Do you think this is a lot of sites? Believe it or not, this is only half the list. I got tired of typing all of them

You may wonder who actually uses all of these sites. I can see some words from other languages besides English. Are they targeted towards certain demographic groups? I don't think anyone knows but I'm sure some smart online marketer will invent an app, widget or plugin that will let us know. However, one advantage of using Facebook for advertisers is the ability to target very closely to people who might buy. Another good under-used advertising media is Google+ as it is tied into the many other forms of Google, including YouTube now.

Interestingly enough, one of the suggestions in Ms. Eichler's article is that we go back to using post cards, sent out to former customers. I guess the rationale here is that past customers are more apt to buy again. However with the Canadian postal rates what they are (twice as high as the US), it seems doubtful that postcards or letters will be the next big viral fad. What do you think about e-mail advertising? Please leave a comment below.