I wasn’t going to write today. I wanted to make some coding
changes to the blog and nothing more. But I noticed my prior post about eliminating
email and I felt compelled to write a post today. It’s ironic that I just
attended a talk about email
marketing at SES by Sundeep Kapur.
In my prior post I wrote, “I have 107 MB on the local
machine and 104 MB on the server. At present the inbox has 436 items and an
additional 100 in the junk folder.” I predicted trusted networks would
eliminate a lot of unsolicited email. But today, two years later, I have 1133
unread items in my inbox and 233 in junk mail. I also keep getting notices that
my mailbox has reached almost 400MB, despite archiving anything over 30 days
and burning anything over a year to DVD for “permanent archiving”. I write
permanent in quotes because digital media is not permanently retrievable. I
think it’s actually permanent in other ways, like permanently burned to disk or
permanently lost or permanently removed from the server. So anyway, unsolicited
email increased over the course of two years. I only digressed because I met an SES
speaker who mentioned that he stored important files on SyQuest disks and now
cannot get those files because the SyQuest drive is obsolete. I am also in that same boat - permanent
storage on magneto-optic discs - but no working drive to read them.
Another speaker reminded me about how you can send email
through Facebook to people you don’t know personally. It costs one dollar per
email to reach some people, more to reach other prominent people and $150 per
email to Mark Zuckerberg himself. So here’s an oxymoron, Facebook Bulk Mail, a
trusted network that should eliminate spam, profiting from allowing people
outside your trusted network to reach your inbox!
I got a lot of great
ideas from Sundeep. He talked about great email headlines generating high email
open rates; great layout and content generating better click through; timing
and relationship building and so on. But here’s the big payday, if the content
is relevant, people will want to read your email, engage with you and your
brand and buy more stuff or join your cause, or help you out.
Imagine the day – another prediction – when
everything about you is so well understood, all your interests and friends and
dining habits and location are granularly targeted by Facebook and other marketers right to
the second on your truly personal, wearable computer. How will you manage
storage for all that email that you’ll want to read but cannot get to in a
lifetime? The future is in storage.
