By Gerry McGovern , January 11, 2001
As 2000 came to a close, most of us were still nursing reality bites. But one thing that has consistently struck me is how amidst all the changes so little has actually changed.
Several years ago, I wrote an article entitled "Email: The Uncrowned King of the Internet." The other day, I read an article in The New York Times entitled "Marketers Turn to a Simple Tool: Email."
Today, I looked at the Yahoo home page, and except for the fact that there are more links on it, it doesn't seem to have changed a lot from the way it looked five years ago. Minimal graphics, lots of hyperlinks on a white background, and standard HTML all add up to a page that downloads quickly and offers lots of ways to access quality content. It's simple, even basic; it does the job.
Email does the job, too, because email is about communicating information and that's mainly why we use the Internet -- to find out something, to communicate something. Because of bandwidth and technology constraints, the Internet has brought us back to the basics of communication -- words. Those who can't communicate their message in words, numbers, and simple images have a hard time on the Internet. Strip Yahoo of words, and you have no Yahoo Strip the Microsoft web site of words, and you have no Microsoft web site.
Businesses sell things. Before the Internet, we built stores and hired people to go out and sell. Yes, we gave them brochures and other written material, but fundamentally selling was about people selling to people. And fundamentally, that's the way it's going to remain. In the majority of situations, quality sales people will always sell more than a web site full of words. I read a study recently that predicted that in the long-term e-commerce would account for no more than 25 percent of trade.
That's still an awful lot of business. As the wild funding spree runs dry, marketers are going back to basics to capture their share of this business. They've realized that the cost of a 30-second ad in the Super Bowl can buy quite a lot of email marketing.
According to a Forrester Research report, it costs $1 a customer to send out a catalog, while a personalized email costs $0.05. While the CTR for banner ads has gone well below 1 percent, email click-through can reach 5-10 percent. Consequently, marketing managers are planning to triple their spending on email marketing by 2004.
It had better be properly targeted. Spam -- mass-distributed, unsolicited emails -- is the bane of our lives. A white-collar worker receives about 40 email messages every day. IDC recently reported that in 2000 10 billion emails were sent every day and this amount will rise to 35 billion by 2005.
However, if we really get to understand our readers/customers so that we know exactly the type of products and services they are interested in, we can send them just the right information to help them make their decisions to purchase. In such an environment, a simple email becomes a powerful tool.