Intrigue In The Inbox

Must... Look...

In the Gartner Group's most recent Hype Cycle Research Report, published about a month ago, there were literally thousands of technologies discussed. On the left side of the axis is all of the stuff that gets venture capital dollars, where the hype starts to build around advancements that will either change the world or just waste a lot of money. Bioacoustic computing, smart dust, human augmentation, 3D bioprinting systems for organ transplant, and so on, and so on. There's no difficulty in getting excited about what these might do, if only they, well, work.

As we move deeper, and the tech becomes more and more real, the slate of development becomes known as the Peak of Inflated Expectations. Here, we've got stuff like self-driving cars, the Internet of Things, wearables, and so on. Stuff that's real, but where all of the kinks haven't been worked out, or how it's supposed to make money.

The next stage is the Trough of Disillusionment, where the hype burns off and we're just left with the realization that while the product might be real, it's also no longer owning a limitless field of potential as to how it's going to change the world. Gartner puts cryptocurrency (aka, bitcoins) here, along with augmented reality and hybrid cloud computing. This is the state where start ups shake out to just the survivors, where the venture capital gets antsy and starts to look for the next new thing, and folks in the space are just getting irritated that what might be an actual business is just getting nicked for a lack of sex appeal. Survive that, and you get to the Slope of Enlightenment, ending in the Plateau of Productivity.

Email, as you might guess, doesn't appear anywhere in this graph. People have been making money in email for so long, you are much more likely to hear how the channel is Dead, rather than anything with any kind of monetization and appeal.

The truly funny thing? There may have never been a better time for the channel.

Why? Well, the obvious point is mobile, which means that the daypart to get emails in front of the audience you need to reach just became, well, damned near 24/7. The average person checks their smartphone over 100 times a day, and so long as the device is latching up to email -- more on that later -- it's just an always-on channel. Send at a time when no one else is sending, and you might get full attention and unmatched consideration.

The next part is, well, the comparative misery of so many other channels. TV has a massive demographic problem, plus ad skipping for additional monetization misery, for anything but DVR-proof live events. Online ads are getting blocked with a vengeance, and have viewability and maladvertising problems to boot. Print and outdoor and radio -- it's not as if any channel, other than email, has actually had life get better recently.

There are, however, problems, and they are major ones. Young people don't read email. They live in social networks, IM and chat... and while they might eventually graduate into email, they also, well, might not. Reading isn't exactly on the rise compared to image-based work, and the channel is under constant stress from overuse, filtering, deliverability, and all of the other challenges that pros have worked on for, well, decades.

But there's still that device in your hands, and the plain and simple fact that when you read an email, there is nothing else on your screen, or in your mind. HTML5 will let you incorporate video and conversions without a landing page visit, and reaching an affluent audience is entirely possible. There are major tactical advantages here that no other channel can match.

Email doesn't sizzle. It just works. And might for decades, or a lot less.

More intriguing than you realized, no?

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