| f-Mail: Facebook ready to change the rules of e-mail |
| Tuesday, 29 March 2011 08:27 |
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Mark Zuckerberg plans to redefine e-mail, the Facebook way.
Mark Zuckerberg plans to redefine e-mail, the Facebook way. Many have interpreted Facebook’s announcement of its unified communications platform as a threat to commercial email. Despite Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks declaring email to be “too slow and formal,” Facebook Inc. has actually embraced commercial email.ClickSquared, an email provider and database marketing solutions found that it is offering users tools to better manage the daily email deluge arriving in their inboxes, and in doing so, may have inadvertently changed the rules of the game for email marketers. In his press conference, Zuckerberg defended the messaging system, saying, 'This is not an email killer. This is a messaging experience that includes email as one part of it. It’s all about making communication simpler. This is the way that the future should work." Whether the future should work this way remains to be seen, but what Facebook is doing is obvious. It wants to give its 500m users a reason to spend even more time on Facebook, and its advertisers an even greater opportunity to reach those users. Once you sift through the ‘cool factor’ of unified cross-channel friend-to-friend messaging, the announcement is really a competitive attack on other web-based email and instant messaging providers such as Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) , Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT ), AOL Inc (NYSE:AOL ) and Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG ). 'Everything Else' folderThis means that when companies overload customers inboxes, simply because the cost is low, will face a new form of penalisation. Customers usually unsubscribe or delete, but this is still not eradicating the irritation totally. For the indiscriminate b2c marketer, Facebook’s announcement should serve as a wake-up call. High frequency, one-size-fits-all email 'blasters' will now be punished for their actions as their emails are automatically routed to the 'everthing else' folder. This is a huge welcome, what with enormous amounts of spam, daily email and annoying advertising received by consumers every day. The 'everything else' folder in Facebook's offering is a purgatory from which few commercial messages will emerge. 'Priority' folderFor the data-driven email marketer, the Facebook announcement actually presents a tremendous opportunity. With the aid of the specific consumers' likes and dislikes, the database marketer can capture preferences that inform everything from favourite products to events to preferred communication frequency. When, due to high relevancy scores, these messages will be routed to the 'priority' inbox, allowing them to be heard above the (current) mailbox noise and chaos. Incentives for the email marketers will be given for sending highly relevant, well-timed and personalised emails that actually make people want to read them and not delete automatically. The marketer that sends an email once a week that is consistantly opened will have a significantly higher relevancy score than the marketer who sends daily one-size-fits all messages that are largely ignored. If the highly relevant emails also receive 'click-throughs', when someone clicks the link to the site, they are rewarded further. These implications are huge: broadcasting a single email message to your entire 'customer list' is now a recipe for disaster. In its place, the direct marketing disciplines of customer database management, preference capture, customer analytics and segmentation have now become the ingredients for success. Mark Zuckerberg likes this.
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