Aptus Consultants

Email as we know it has been around for nearly 30 years, and its mass uptake has grown pretty well hand in glove with the growth of business and domestic internet access. Indeed it could be argued that in the early days of the home internet when dial up was the norm, email was a rather more beneficial service than the ‘World Wide Wait’ experience of accessing websites.

In many ways Email is an ideal communications tool because it is personal, auditable, high impact, interactive, used widely and very, very cheap. Indeed we send over 2 million emails a minute in the UK. Unfortunately, these features have also led to email being abused by people and organisations to send messages:

• To people who have not given the appropriate permission (Spamming).
• Without proper targeting so the majority of recipients find it an uninvited intrusion.
• Which promote inappropriate products and services.
• With the intent of spreading viruses.

As a result, email became rather discredited as a customer communications tool as companies wanted to avoid the risk of being labelled as spammers. The good news on that front is that there have been a number of initiatives to address these issues, including:

• Legislation at UK and EC level to control the sending of unsolicited email.
• Codes of practice amongst email list brokers to verify that the addresses they supply are compliant.
• Enhancements to email services and anti viral software to block emails which are spam or which pose a viral threat.

Email is a really versatile tool that can be used for a variety of business purposes including promotion, administration, relationship building and retention. There are also a wide variety of tools available to help organisations to run their own email campaigns including:

• Contact management tools to help organise your email addresses and generate campaigns.
• Design products which enable you to produce professional, high impact communications.
• Integration tools which allow you to draw content from the web, thus providing the recipient with current and engaging information.
• Web based email services which combine all of the above, thus making it easy to run and manage your email campaigns.

So while it is entirely legitimate to investigate the newer technologies available and to work them in to your communications mix, please do not forget the humble email. It might just still be the most effective weapon in your armoury. Indeed, as the quote goes:

 “To select well among old things, is almost equal to inventing new ones”