Now before you think to yourself; wow, yet another blog about email? How boring and unoriginal! Or, you may be asking yourself, isn’t email an antiquated form of marketing? Well we promise you this is not one of those blogs - so please hear us out!
Email has come an extremely long way since the first email was sent in the early 1970’s by a man named Ray Tomilson. Now fast forward 50 years later, it’s estimated that as of 2020, there are 3 BILLION email users. Long story short, emails are great and are beneficial to brands of any size. If done strategically and correctly, email can establish a real human-to-human connection between brand and customer. In a world where there is a lot of distracting outside noise, this can become a totally irreplaceable experience for prospects and customers.
But enough about the importance of emails because as intelligent marketers, we know you already know this and like we promised, this is not the purpose of this blog. At HEEDGROUP, we believe that email has become the new form of texting. So what exactly do we mean by this?
Lets face it - even prior to the pandemic, people were constantly using their phone, iPad, desktop, laptop, ETC. Whether for news updates, the latest technology releases, shopping for the best fall sale, or to see if their Amazon Prime package has arrived, people were connected online 99% of the time. Now, fast forward to March of 2020, a majority of people began working remotely due to COVID - 19. This massive shift sparked everyone to become even more connected via technology. Daily physical contact with coworkers, clients, business associates, schools seemed to disappear overnight which meant a larger reliance on technology to fill this chasm.
Another interesting thing to note is not only do people need to be more connected from a business and work perspective, people need to be more connected in terms of a health and safety perspective. People want and need alerts to navigate through this pandemic in order to feel and stay safe.
So what on earth does this have to do with email?
Well, I am glad you asked!
In order to stay in the know, people’s cellphone and computer alerts are now more important than ever and people have been forced to pay more and more attention to them to never miss a beat. According to a study conducted by Clever Tap in September 2020, 44% of iOS users and 91% of Android users opt in to receive push notifications on their phones.
Both iOS and Android users have the ability to set up their email alerts so that they come in the exact same way as a text from your mom or best friend would - I mean look at these screen grabs from two HEEDGROUP employees. You can barely tell which is the email alert and which is the text alert - the only defining factor is the small app picture in the top left corner of the alert.
But how do we know that other people are actually doing this, and it's not just me doing this for the sake of this blog post? Well fair point, I like the way you think! With that being said, hopefully this inference I am about to go into will convince you that I am not (totally) off my rocker.
Take Outlook for example. As of April 2019, Microsoft Outlook had more than 100 million Android and iOS users. So let’s think of it like this:
You download an app with the intent of actually using it, or why would you download it in the first place. Nobody is forcing you to have this app on your phone so if you are downloading it, odds are pretty good you are going to use it. So assuming you want this app on your phone, you most likely also want to receive alerts from this app because once again, you have chosen to download it, why not reap the benefits it sews. Now okay, I obviously cannot say that every single person out of this 100 million + has enabled their push notifications, but I can say with great certainty that most of those individuals have.
In fact, according to Business of Apps, the average opt - in rate across the two biggest mobile operating systems stands at 67.5%. Still not convinced? In addition, emailmonday.com reports that over 70% of people use smartphones to check their emails regularly.
So with that all this being said, email and text have virtually become one in the same based on the user’s experience through alerts. Tune in next week when we go over some email best practices and what kind of email send schedule we at HEEDGROUP follow.