We’re at an email tipping point

At 8:30 this morning, I had received 243 emails. It’s about the same every morning. It took me about 5 minutes to delete 222 of them. I kept 21 to review later or 8.6%. It’s about the same every morning as most of them are sales pitches for products or services I may have a tangential interest in. Tomorrow and the next day will be no different. In total, I get 3,000 to 5,000 emails a week and fewer than 5% are of real interest to me.

According to Statista, 376.4 billion emails are sent every day around the world. Estimates of how many don’t go into spam folders, sit unopened in email boxes, or are opened and quickly deleted run from 10% to 15%. In other words, nearly 9 out of every 10 emails sent have no impact at all except to take up someone’s time and space on their drive…and we all pay for that in our time and to companies like Google, Apple and others.

Emails are expected to rise to more than 408 billion a day by 2027, and there’s no end in sight. As AI proliferates and says we are all prospects for someone’s business, the onslaught will only continue. I believe we are at a tipping point of how many emails we can receive and process, and the percentage of unread emails is likely to increase. 

What’s the solution?

There will be more services that limit emails that get through, but there also will be a movement toward emailing based on human relationships, and those will get opened, read, and responded to at higher levels. We are going to move toward the humanization of data along with AI. It’s important to keep in mind that every trend has a countertrend. We’ll see a merging of both. We’re already seeing AI bots that can respond in a way that listens, care about what we believe, and build onto our thinking. Email marketing is going to change from projecting purchases based on past behavioral algorithms to building relationships based on asking questions and responding in a caring way. 

This will initially affect Boomers, Gen X and Millennials. Gen Z and younger cohorts will be slower to change as they are dependent on text and social media, but there are increasing signs that younger generations are becoming disenchanted with the overload of messaging. Everyone wants to be listened to. Everyone wants to tell their story, and we all want to know someone is listening. Those who actually ask, listen and respond will see their emails and texts opened, read and acted upon. The others will continue to go into spam and be unread.

You can call it humanistic, emotional, neural marketing or take your pick. It’s what we’re developing and we believe others will be too.