Newsletter #100 Email Matures

Created on 27/10/05

A special hello to all new subscribers. This article is on the Web at this address.

Our last newsletter (15th September, 2005) was "SPIT on VoIP"
This article is based on one that appeared in the October edition of Business to Business.

Welcome to our 100th newsletter! It's coincidental that this newsletter is about a email maturing - this newsletter has certainly matured over the six and a half years we have published it. We thank you for your continued support. :-)

Email is such a big part of our working and personal lives that it is hard to imagine life without it. Although email is such a fixture there are signs that it is being replaced by other modes of communication.

In a recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project entitled "Teens and Technology" (PDF) the authors note that "when asked about which modes of communication they use most often when communicating with friends, online teens consistently choose IM (Instant Messaging) over email in a wide array of contexts."

Interestingly this study doesn't break out podcasting and blogging, two other communication technologies that are currently very hot.

American Internet marketing organisation Doubleclick also report a 23.6% decline in email open rates for the second quarter 2005 compared to the second quarter 2004. So for marketers trying to reach consumers, email is becoming less effective over time. The reasons for this decline are thought to be:

1. That ISPs are tightening their filtering of email so that many marketing messages are getting rejected as spam.
2. Users are "blacklisting" the marketer's address rather than bothering to unsubscribe.
3. Because users are receiving so much more email, including more spam, legitimate messages can get lost in the flood and therefore not opened.
4. Users are more aware of viruses, spyware and other nasties that can be unleashed by opening email. Hence they are more conservative.
5. Users change email addresses often so that a marketer's database can deteriorate quickly

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Although it may be losing its lustre as the Internet's "Killer App", email is still used by 89% of online teens and 90% of online adults in the Pew study noted above. Users may be becoming more reticent in opening marketing messages and anything that looks suspicious, but email is still the predominant mode of communication online.

It has taken up the role as a primary social connector and even as a conveyor of gifts within a social network. In an article "Forward Thinking" by Smith, Ubois and Gross they point out that "In the “gift economy” model forwarded messages can be viewed as low cost tokens that are exchanged in order to maintain both weak and strong social ties."

Email continues to live on but is no longer at the forefront of communication developments; it is a mode that is taken for granted. A bit like the telephone, available and used when advantageous to do so.

Email has matured.

Newbies

Keyboard shortcuts are always quicker once you get used to using them. Some keyboard shortcuts for Outlook Express (OE) and Outlook (O):

Send/receive email: Ctrl+M (OE), F9 (O)
New message: Ctrl+N
Reply to sender: Ctrl+R
Forward an email: Ctrl+F

Power Users

A feature of IE5+, later Netscape versions and Firefox is that it lets Webmasters design an icon that will appear to the left of your site's title on the "favorites" menu and on the address bar, rather than the plain default logo. To take advantage of this, make an icon that describes your site in a graphics software program or visit www.favicon.co.uk. It will need to be 16x16 pixels in size so make it very simple eg. a single letter. Work in 256 colours only and export the finished image as a bitmap, say "favicon.bmp". Rename this as "favicon.ico". Transfer this file to your Website and then include the following tag between your "head" tags: <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.your_website.com/favicon.ico">.

For previous tips visit the Power Hot Tips page.

Copyscape makes it easy to find copies of your content on the Web. If you type in the address of your Webpage, Copyscape will use Google to find any other sites using your text. When I typed in the address of one of my old articles I found it repeated word-for-word on a site in the Netherlands! http://www.copyscape.com/

Google, once again has announced something new (no surprise there!), a new search facility for blogs. You can type in keywords or use the advanced search option. With blogs becoming increasingly important, this facility is worth knowing about. http://www.google.com/blogsearch

"Those who agree with us may not be right, but we admire their astuteness." Cullen Hightower

You can see our other Quick Quotes on the front page of www.netinsites.com; just refresh the page to see another one randomly selected from our database. Great for presentations or times when you want to appear to be a techno-dude(ss)!

To access previous newsletters visit our newsletter archive.

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Best wishes

Alex Garden

Internet Strategy | Website Design | Website Promotion | Web Text Messaging | Email Newsletters | Online Sports Games | Content Management