Are email open rates plummeting and undervalued?

A friend recently told me an interesting phenomenon: Why do many people dislike email and even criticize it, but major Internet companies continue to develop new email products, and even more and more startups are entering the market? This seems to be a paradox, but if you think about it carefully, it is also a very interesting thing.

The first step to understanding this phenomenon is to understand the dilemma of email. First of all, email, as a basic Internet service, has a history of more than 40 years since records began. During this period, the form of email has not undergone fundamental changes, from basic transmission protocols to basic mail formats, etc. However, in the past two decades, the rapid development of the Internet has made email "accessible to ordinary people" and the popularization of technology has brought about an explosion of massive emails. According to data published by The Conversation, 168 million emails were sent every minute worldwide in 2012.

After entering the era of big data, the amount of information carried by a single email is getting larger and larger, and everyone's mailbox is filled with emails. A survey by the British Daily Mail stated that more than a quarter of the working time of most employees in companies is not spent on work, but is wasted on sending, receiving or sorting emails. It seems that many people's "work" is to reply to and write emails, but the truth is that when you are "working" on emails, you are not actually working.

The prevalence of email overload, spam and phishing emails has put the email world in jeopardy. Especially after the rise of social media, the advantages of email in communication speed and efficiency have gradually disappeared. This is more prominent on mobile devices. People now increasingly prefer to use WeChat and Weibo private messages instead of email for some work communication, and the email opening rate has plummeted. This may be the reason why email has been criticized - in the face of a variety of new Internet services, email is indeed like an "antique."

Yet the value of email cannot be ignored.

Is email undervalued?

First, email is the epitome of decentralization. Many people often overlook this point, thinking that emails can only be published through mailboxes such as Gmail and NetEase Mail. In fact, emails only need a domain name and a server, and deploy the corresponding protocols to be initially sent.

There are also communication tools based on email protocols abroad, such as BitChat, which ensure security to a large extent. This is almost the most important manifestation of the early Internet spirit - it is not subject to any commercial company, but is a tool that truly serves individuals, but this spirit has gradually disappeared today.

Secondly, the email subject-based information exchange method helps improve efficiency. Emails have a default title. Some people tend to dislike this design and often receive emails with empty titles. But in fact, this design just reflects people’s essential definition of email communication - subject-based. Organize emails by topic, allowing everyone to speak, discuss, and reach a consensus under this topic, and finally present a relatively complete message.

Now other communication tools, such as WeChat and QQ, are just fragmented information exchanges. Friends who have participated in QQ group chats must understand that the most feared thing in group chats is that the topic is scattered. In the end, people often talk to themselves without any meaningful discussion.

Third, the delay in receiving emails is, in a sense, a liberation for users. From text messages to WeChat, "instant reply" has gradually become people's understanding of communication tools, but "instant reply" makes both the sender and the receiver confused about "when to throw away the boots". A joke goes like this: An old man with a bad heart is used to the sound of the young man upstairs throwing boots every night, but one day after the young man threw a boot, he suddenly realized that he shouldn't do this, so he carefully put the other boot on the ground. This kind act directly led to the old man falling into deep anxiety - whether he would throw it away or not, and when would he throw it away.

Email, because of its themed communication method, eliminates fragmented and verbose information - you might write a love letter of several thousand words via email, but you probably wouldn't write a single sentence to ask someone what they did today.

The above characteristics (some people think they are advantages, some people think they are disadvantages) have given email its own living space - whether it is for corporate users or individual users, the value of email is irreplaceable, and this has also spawned a large number of new email products.

Competition in email services intensifies

The launch of Gmail by Google in 2004 was a milestone in the history of email products. Even from today's perspective, Gmail's innovation and greatness are still indelible. For example, it was the first time that the storage space of the mailbox was increased from MB to GB; it truly realized the theme-based email conversation mode; with the help of powerful search capabilities, an email from ten years ago can be instantly presented to the user... In a sense, Gmail defined a new way of Web mailboxes. In the following years, both domestic and foreign mailbox products have more or less borrowed the design concept of Gmail.

The advent of the mobile Internet era has brought new opportunities to email products. For example, mMailbox, a mobile email client acquired by Dropbox for $100 million last year (a Mac desktop version has been launched this year), has some eye-catching features. It changes the basic way of processing emails - checking replies, and instead relies on the concept of time management to treat each email as a task that needs to be processed. At the same time, it sets up corresponding processing scenarios, making everything from processing actions to time arrangements extremely flexible.

Google has extended Mailbox's "scenario" approach. In its new email product Inbox, Google has used big data technology to the extreme. By automatically scanning and classifying user emails, it automatically completes the classification of email "scenarios". For example, when you receive a discount email from an e-commerce company, traditional email products will put it in the "inbox" or "trash", but Inbox automatically classifies the email into the "promotion" email category by identifying keywords such as "discount" in the email. At this point, the email service has become the user's personal assistant.

Not only Internet companies are targeting email, but traditional IT companies targeting corporate customers are also starting to optimize their email products. Verse, launched by IBM, has fundamentally changed the impression that corporate email services are rigid and have no sense of design. IBM hopes to make email the center of internal collaboration within the enterprise and connect various links such as social networking and CRM.

Microsoft has always swept the corporate email market with Outlook. Outlook's functions are indeed very powerful, but it is also not easy to use. Microsoft has been making many optimizations in interface design and functional experience, such as the Clutter function released by Microsoft this month. It acts as an intelligent mail filter, rearranging mail content according to its importance. Clutter takes full advantage of Office Graph's processing engine to learn and determine the priority of emails and automatically sort them. Another rumor related to Microsoft email is that Microsoft has acquired mobile email client company Acompli and is fully deploying in the mobile email field.

Now, when we go back to the question at the beginning of the article, we not only have the answer, but also have a deeper understanding of a fact that is happening: everything people say in emails is recorded and analyzed by machines. Emails will become a way for you to access the world, but they will also be a way for machines to understand and know you. So, from now on, you might as well write emails seriously.