ColdSpark Blog

Trevor Lavens, Managing Director of Financial Services

In today’s world, consumers and businesses alike are inundated with a myriad of different ways to communicate to conduct business.  Businesses – large and small – are faced with rapid changes in the way their customers are engaging in communications.  Social networking (facebook, myspace, linkedin, twitter) has taken off like wildfire in just a few short years.  SMS (albeit a mature protocol) has also become one medium of choice for communications, especially in younger demographics, and especially in the Asia-Pacific and (to a lesser extent) European markets.  Instant Messaging in various forms continues to grow.  Couple these trends with the explosion in the mobile device smartphone market, consumers and businesses alike are expecting to be communicated with in a wide variety of ways.

So this begs the following questions:  With all of these new communication capabilities, is email dying as a key business channel?  Will email be eclipsed by something else in the near term?

My short answer to both of these questions is a definitive NO, especially in North America.   And here is my reasoning….

1. Email is ubiquitous – Email is virtually everywhere.  The overwhelming majority of consumers use email every day to manage their lives, and the vast majority of businesses use email to conduct business.  Even with newly emerging communications channels, there would have to be an overwhelming market shift to displace the ubiquity of email.

2. Email has been around a long, long, time – SMTP as a protocol has been around for 25-30 years.  Despite the flakey nature of the protocol itself (best-attempt, no universal authentication standards, security flaws, the list goes on an on), its longevity has contributed to its ubiquity.  And its longevity has also contributed to cultural acceptance by society at large as the Number One messaging mechanism to communicate electronically for at least the last 10 years.

3. For consumers, Email is basically free:  Access to email account is virtually free for consumers, apart from the cost of internet access.  So if you, as a consumer, have access to the internet (via a mobile device with a data plan, via your workplace, via home internet access or even at an internet café), sending and receiving email is essentially free of charge.  Social networking sites that use messaging (facebook, myspace, linkedin, twitter, others) are also free, but with the annoyances of navigating through advertising as well as a lack of anonymity (through presence on the sites themselves) that email provides.  SMS is certainly NOT free (for either the consumer or businesses that wish to leverage the channel), as it remains one of the U.S. carriers’ main sources of revenue.

4. For businesses, Email is one of the most important productivity tools for employees:  For many businesses, especially services-oriented-ones (Financial Services, Legal, Insurance, Consulting), email is an extremely important productivity and collaboration application, if not THE most important application.

5. And the list goes on….

So if is true (and I’m willing to debate anybody on counter points), I think this raises more interesting questions for businesses.  If email remains a key channel, how do businesses reconcile this with new trends in communications and messaging?  How do businesses engage with their customers with all of these channels?  And which channels take priority, and why?  And what about changing regulations?  I think I’ll share my thoughts on these questions in future posts *grin*