Email is Dead

As I contemplated how best to communicate a new advice series that I’m writing, my first thought (as a result of reading lots of different posts and blogs and books on the topic) was to do it as an email series. Get the user to sign up for the series, and they then get the series via email. You also then have their (very valuable) email address for future marketing purposes — a win-win for everyone. As I thought it through, though, it seemed like there were lots of problems with this approach.

So, because I think this topic is important and because I haven’t found an intelligent discussion on its pros and cons, I have invited Internet marketer Eric Giguere to have a cross-blog discussion with me.

In this first post, I will outline the problems I see with delivering information via email and why I think it may be dead as a serious business communication tool. Eric will then respond with a post on his site, and we’ll keep going back and forth as long as necessary. Be sure to include your comments as well, and we can introduce those into the discussion.

So, without further ado, why email is dead…

Instantly Out of Date

As soon as you send an email, it’s gone. There’s no way to update the information in the email without sending another email, but in most cases you’re definitely going to want to update that information at some point. Doing that with email is cumbersome at best.

Restricted Readership

As you well know, getting someone to give out their email address is extremely difficult. As a result, making your information available only via email will severely limit your readership. I have a very hard time believing that the significant number of potential readers you lose is offset by the increased value of those you capture.

Limited Control Over Presentation

If you think designing for all the different combinations of web browers and operating systems is tough, try multiplying that many times over when you design for an email client. Not only that, but email clients often don’t have near the capability as a web browser. The result is information communicated in a much more limited form than it can be communicated online.

So What’s the Alternative?

I think the next time I need to communicate a large amount of information, I’ll do it with a blog platform like WordPress. Readers can subscribe to updates in a wide variety of ways, including via email, and you can make changes to the content in real-time. Not only that, it’s probably even easier than publishing the content via email. If you still want to restrict access to those who have signed up with an email address, you can do that as well.

So, unless it’s just a one-time or customized mailing, I don’t know why you would choose to communicate information to your customers via email. However, that’s (intentionally) a gross generalization. I hope I’ve included enough of those in my analysis to give Eric some good counterpoints.

Over to you, Eric!