The proliferation of touch points has lead to great engagement dissipation. Brands and services don’t just want to connect, they want to instill and nurture a unique loyalty based on excitement, trust and authenticity. Email is still the only channel that engenders trust merely by giving us, the user, control of the noise. Getting that right kind of attention is not in the middle of a social media feed, or popping up as a full page ad to an article you thought you wanted to read and then got blurry vision — “Am I reading about the solar eclipse, HP’s latest cloud computing achievements or what superfood is not in my refrigerator right now, but should be?”
It self organizes
In email, the noise reverberates more sensibly in your inbox. You receive something because at one point, your curiosity was peeked, and then fulfilled further by the quality of the material. Your email provider classified it as such, notifies you of it’s nature, and then you make a simple choice about further classifying it’s importance. Depending on whether it’s on a prescient topic, critically related to a near term goal, or simply insightful takes and info on a topic you love, that you’d prefer to revisit sporadically.
It holds your most important info
People use email as their primary ledger for their lives. Bills to pay, travel plans, work items, social engagements, etc…Your primary registry of all the important people, places and items to keep on top of. You make note of, socialize, reference, and complete these items.
When you browse Twitter or Facebook, your attention is fleeting, briefly focused at best. Items you pause on do not have your undivided attention until you tag and store them to revisit later on (Evernote, Pocket, Instapaper). That’s another degree removed from your current attention flow.
On mobile
People check their email on mobile more than ever, and the message design flexibility allows you to capitalize on the strength of the channel from the get go. Plan your strategy for email as a medium, that has visual compatibility across device types.
Singular
Now, email works best when the engagement level is regular but narrow, rather singular. Meaning the user opens an email for this bit of info once, absorbs it’s value in a single sitting, and then moves on. Maybe there’s an action that you can put off to another time, but your time with it is complete in one session.
In prelude to a separate piece on broad scope communications: In today’s world, when you want broad and continuous engagement…Slack it. Marketers will hate that. Millions of eyeball hours taken from email to an isolated yarn ball of communication capillaries, coursing exclusively with user generated exchanges, on topics that mean a lot to them.
