The Future of Email: Is Email Still Relevant?

The Future of Email Looks Bright

CEO of SocketLabs, Keith Hontz, was recently featured in the Email Marketing 2019 Report, released by eMarketer, accompanied by 13 other email-industry leaders.  This report comes at a pivotal time, as growth in modern forms of communication and marketing leaves businesses questioning the current and continued relevance of email in the digital economy. The results are in, and the numbers tell a promising story about the future of email.  It turns out email isn’t slowing down at all – quite the opposite. 

Email Marketing 2019 Report Takeaways 

In a report centered around the future of email, SocketLabs was happy to join the conversation. The eMarketer report points to persistent email popularity and positive trends in the overall usage of email. As a matter of fact, “According to polling conducted by the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), checking email was the most cited activity among US internet users in both 2018 and 2019, on desktop and laptop PCs, as well as via mobile apps.”  And while the current numbers look good, you might be questioning how these numbers will change in the future as new, more advanced forms of communication come to surface. The chart below not only highlights the modest growth of email users from previous to current day, it also shows projections up to 2022.  

Yet despite positive trends in all the right places, the email industry still has its challenges. And with over 400 million business emails sent through our infrastructure every month, we have a pretty good idea of what the industry looks like and a lot of the challenges companies are looking to overcome.  Hontz offered invaluable insight into some of the realities that companies are facing with their email communication, “We see about 20% of legitimate, business-relevant emails just not getting to the inbox of the intended recipient,” he said. “It depends on the industry, and the use case, and type of email, and the data quality. It certainly has become more of an issue, more of a business-critical item for the whole customer experience.” 

But if email is so popular and shows such promising signs of growth, shouldn’t it be easier for these companies to hit the inbox? Let’s dive into some of the current challenges we are helping thousands of businesses solve every day. 

Challenges in the Email Industry and How to Overcome Them

With over 90% of people on the internet using email, and around 124 billion emails sent every day, there are inherently limitations and challenges that exist.  Even businesses sending good quality, high-volume email know how hard it can be to actually land in the inbox.  

Even if you are sending the safest type of transactional mail that should have the best chances of landing in the inbox, there are still many hurdles and barriers that must be overcome to successfully get there.  That’s where an email service provider like SocketLabs comes in. SocketLabs helps customers fix email problems in these three common areas:

Infrastructure

Often times businesses big and small don’t have the expertise, funding or want the hassle of running and managing their own email infrastructure.  The server maintenance, lack of support, and overall technical complexity involved in running an email infrastructure in-house will lead to more overhead costs and headaches than expected.  When your business depends on email, the last thing you want to worry about is infrastructure reliability, that’s why many companies will partner with an email service. 

Support and Consulting 

Sending email is even more of a science than just making sure your infrastructure is running full speed ahead.  There are tons of unspoken rules and regulations set by mailbox providers, like Gmail, that impact a business’s ability to successfully get their mail to the inbox.  SocketLabs has been in the email business for over 10 years and we know this space quite well.  The SocketLabs support and consulting team is always there to answer all of your deliverability and technical email questions.  Beyond having  someone to answer questions, our email experts can help guide you down the path of good deliverability with things like IP warming, suppression list management, white-labeling, and much more. 

*To learn more about why your emails might not be getting to the inbox, read my email deliverability best practices blog here*

Reporting

Email analytics are everything, businesses want to see how their email is performing.  Sending email through your own infrastructure can result in minimal or unreliable reporting. The SocketLabs email infrastructure provides detailed reporting that can be broken down by mail stream, by category (i.e. sent, opened, failed, delivered, etc.) and provides both high level performance overviews and very granular performance metrics that are completely customizable based on what you want to observe. 

What the Future of Email Means for Your Business 

Whether it is transactional or marketing email, your business depends on email as a major medium of communication between you and your stakeholders.  It should be reassuring to know that email is still, and will continue to be an effective way for big and small businesses to reach their customers. But as the scale of email expands, so do the complexities involved with hitting the inbox.  SocketLabs is here to help your business navigate the increasingly complex email landscape.

With growth comes new complexities, and SocketLabs is here to help you achieve your business goals.  To learn more about SocketLabs and sign up for a completely free plan,  view our plans and pricing page.