Are we better off without email?

Communications / 11 November 2011

No email day aims to get managers to lay off emails for a whole 24 hours. While resisting completely may be impossible, it does suggest ways we could use it more effectively, reports Matt McAllister

As its name suggests, no email day is intended to be a time for employees to reconsider firing off unnecessary emails to colleagues, clients and customers. Following a well-publicised Facebook campaign, its organisers are encouraging people to substitute email correspondence with personal face-to-face or phone interaction, and to replace the time spent wading through emails with more urgent tasks.

While it is unlikely that organisations will be able to forgo email entirely, the concept is likely to resonate with many managers. After all, it is estimated that up to half of a working day can be devoted to sending, reading or replying to emails, which can have a major impact on both your own productivity and that of your team.

This perhaps explains why in a recent UK survey by the digital marketing group Econsultancy, 44% of UK correspondents voted email as their preferred customer service channel, but only 33% of them considered it the most effective.

No email day is the brainchild of Paul Lancaster, founder of digital marketing organisation Plan Digital. "There are so many emails flying around every second of the day that it can sometimes feel like dealing with them is all that you're doing," he says in his manifesto. "There are many people out there who really dread coming back to work after a short break or sickness for fear of what lies waiting in their inbox."

Yet not everyone agrees that email correspondence is a waste of time. Sam Cece, CEO of StrongMail, who advise companies on emarketing solutions, considers that organisations need to target their email communications more carefully rather than stop sending them altogether.

Quite simply, if your messages aren't relevant to the recipient, they are little more than congestion for the inbox.

Sam Cece, CEO of StrongMail

"Relevant, targeted emails have been shown to drive 16 times more revenue than traditional broadcast mailings," he says. "The majority of companies are sitting on customer data derived from interactions across multiple channels, including retail stores, websites and call centres. Email is the best channel for bringing all of this together. By using this data to create a more complete picture of the customer and deliver relevant messages to the right customer at the right time, companies have been able to improve the performance of their campaigns by 15 times."

Marketing-savvy audience

Despite being passionate about email as a form of communication, Cece can see why no email day has come into existence. "Email is clearly a time waster when unsolicited, irrelevant content is pitched out to an increasingly marketing-savvy audience. That is exactly what no email day is rallying against," he says. "But when messaging has been well-targeted and well-timed, or is triggered by specific activities, then email remains the quickest, easiest and most effective way for people to find what they are looking for."

Cece has outlined four common mistakes that organisations make in their email correspondence with clients and customers:

1. Not properly setting expectations during the opt-in process. Do your customers know what value your emails will bring them each time they allow you into their inbox?

 
2. Not collecting enough data during the opt-in process to be able to utilise personalisation, segmentation, or targeting.

3. Assuming that because customers were once interested and signed up that they will always find your messages interesting and relevant.

4. Assuming that because it's coming from the brand, it must be relevant.

The secret to a successful email strategy, Cece advises, is to make sure that every email you send is relevant to an individual customer, rather than just creating an impersonal marketing campaign.

"Nobody likes to feel like they're being marketed to, no matter what the channel," he says. "Quite simply, if your messages aren't relevant to the recipient, they are little more than congestion for the inbox. This only contributes to the irritation consumers are quite rightly showing towards poorly executed email communications."