How will E-mail Marketing cope with Artificial Intelligence?

We all know that Microsoft has made numerous tweaks to Outlook over the years, but for me, there have been few if any revolutionary changes. As a result we have perhaps become a bit complacent that the future of email in two, five or ten year’s time will not be that radically different to the reality today. My view on that has changed in recent weeks. The ‘future of email’ could be here much sooner than well all think and the challenges to email marketing could be profound.

What’s got me thinking was a recent article in Wired magazine on the increasingly fraught relationship we have with email, which to some degree mirrored my relationship with my own inbox.  A few years ago I started using a nifty programme called X1 to index and better search my ever growing email archive. The amount of time (and frustration!) it has saved me has been amazing and today I really couldn’t live without it. This is just one example of how the changes made to Outlook over the years haven’t really been geared to making our experience with email smoother and more efficient.

Now a new generation of software startups have noticed some of the other glaring gaps in Outlook’s functionality and are attempting to fill them. There are new ones appearing all the time but the two that have been receiving the most attention recently are Xobni and ClearContext. Both are free to download plug-ins which integrate with Outlook’s interface and use clever analytics to highlight patterns in e-mail usage. They also provide a range of cool features which automate many of those tasks which can take forever when using Outlook.

Clive Thompson’s recent article on e-mail in Wired magazine is a must read and highlights the excitement that users who have downloaded the applications feel. The piece also points to the potential challenges which could face the e-mail marketing industry as a result. For instance, Clive talks about how Xobni has identified the times when his most important contacts are likely to e-mail him, and how he has used this to ‘switch off’ e-mail during the periods in between.

The ClearContext application also offers the ability to use its ‘artificial intelligence’ to automatically sort a user’s inbox and provide recommendations on which e-mails to read and reply to first, based on who you tend to respond to most quickly. This is a major change to the first-come first served approach which has typified most e-mail use to date.

So the obvious question is how will these new e-mail applications treat marketing e-mails? Will they be automatically banished to a special folder, sent to the back of the priority queue or automatically labeled as ‘spam’. The answer is we don’t yet know. Most of these applications are still at version 1 and it’s difficult to predict how they might develop and evolve.

I think what could be as significant as how marketing e-mails will be classified are the behavioral changes in e-mail use that these applications could encourage. If e-mail moves from being an always-on tool to one which is used more selectively, how will this impact on how often and when we deploy campaign on behalf of our clients? As an industry, we will certainly need to conduct much more detailed research into people’s daily e-mail habits rather than continue to rely on potentially out-dated assumptions. 

Now there are some people who will say that all this is just the latest Web 2.0 fad. These applications could easily remain in the realm of ‘techie geeks’ or they could spread virally and become everyday tools. Only time will tell. In either case, the interest in them will probably not go unnoticed by Microsoft’s developers in Redmond working on new versions of Outlook. Better analytics functionality and an intelligent inbox designed to improve the productivity of employees would certainly be a very powerful USP. On which would certainly encourage businesses to invest in a major software upgrade!

I for one will definitely be following these companies with interest. As an industry we should of course never fear change and innovation - but we do need think ahead and start planning now for the potentially huge impacts, both positive and negative, that these simple pieces of code could have on our multi-billion dollar industry.

By Simone Barratt, Managing Director, e-Dialog EMEA

Comments

[John W. Furst]

Interesting thoughts. Please, let me add my 2 cents.

(1) I don't think email is an always on medium anyway. And more and more people tend to 'batch' process their email and Web2.0 activities. It's just too much of a time waster.

(2) The AI software will learn from the user, how to treat certain emails... Therefore, all a marketer needs to do is to build a relationship with his list members. This is best done by delivering useful, targeted content and offers on a regular basis. I don't necessarily feel that "we" marketers need to be afraid of this.

Yours
John

[David Taboada]

I certainly agree on the "need to conduct much more detailed research into people’s daily e-mail habits".

Regardless of the technology used on the client side, relevance will dictate if an email is read or not.

On the other hand, software developers of email campaign managers as well as ESP's should take note and enhance their products with analytics that go beyond opens and click-troughs.

Thank you Simone for contributing this excellent post.

[john.jones.name]

the interesting thing is to watch the Advert price on things like facebook and other social networks since these have failed to gain popularity even though they huge amounts of data on the person... so therefore could be really targeted

email marketing only works because people either want it i.e. targeted or are duped into looking at it (that can be good/bad) and the advertising can then affect them

if people's eyes dont get to see it it's because they dont want it or are unable to be duped into it

i.e. deliverability of the email being "viewed"

tools will be skewed towards replies thinking they are the most important and so harm the ability of marketing emails since most people dont reply to these

regards

John Jones
http://www.johnjones.me.uk

[J.OBrien]

I have to agree and add that I have been an advocate for xobni- mostly to overcome outlook's lackluster search functionality. It's another sign of how email becomes more distinct in the inbox, but even more critical to email marketers is making their email more distinct to ISPs and Receivers vs. the junk data flow that gets dropped on the floor- compliance management and reputation are making this possible and we hope Authentication can lift more of the burden for email in the future. Email does seem as ingrained as television in our culture- we need to collaborate so much more to make it work better.