Is Email Dying?

Over the last few months, some Internet pundits have declared that
email is dying. They proclaim their fear for the future of emails is cannibalization
by Facebook and Twitter.

How Many Automated Email Are Sent Per Day?

According to Pingdom, there is a total of about 3 billion email
accounts on the planet. Assuming all of them are active and user
receive on average 2 automated emails per day (transactional, bulk, …), this means 4 billion automated emails are sent per day. This
number is a back of the envelope calculation but it recoups what I
know about the market.

By the way, Facebook has 700 million members, to most of which they
are sending email notifications multiple times per day. This would
mean that Facebook “owns” the biggest part of this figure. Getting
access to their data on their email infrastructure would be very
useful.

Mobile Email Is The Future

In 2010, there were 4.6 billion cell phones and growing. Each new
smartphones come with one or two full fledged email clients and it is
held as a fact than in 2 years all cellphones will be smartphones,
doubling the amount of email accounts within the next few years.
Mobile email is an industry that many deliverability support suppliers
are trying to wrap their heads around, but it is a very different
beast to tackle.

A few fundamental differences:

• Screen real estate is very small – Immediate message impact is more important
• Plain text formats are still being favored (or very simple html)
• Senders rely less heavily on design
• Image trackers are even more unreliable – mobile is not an always-on
  connection
• Deliverability is even more important as the spambox is usually not
  accessible or is very well hidden.

Here at CritSend, around 15% of messages are accessed through mobile devices.

Email Is Cool Again

Mobile email is now a strong strategic space for many companies. Gmail
is embedded with any Android or iPhone, and mobile users are sending
more emails than texts with their phone. VCs are pouring money into
mobile mail as they see the future shaping around.
In short, email is NOT dying. It’s growing up.

Open Question

The email infrastructure will grow and can handle that growth easily.
The real question is what will we do with this opportunity?
What kinds of email should we send?
How should we use email notification knowing that Android, iPhone and
Blackberry offer their own features for that?

Nicolas Toper, Margaret Morris from Critsend

Last 5 posts by Nicolas Toper

• Hotmail Deliverability Remedies - March 30th, 2012
• DMARC: What is it and how does it work? First impressions. - February 1st, 2012
• Fixing Gmail Deliverability Problems - November 7th, 2011
• Transitioning from IP to DNS: Part 1 - June 20th, 2008