Email, Still A Sonofabitch!

Just about two years ago, I went off the deep end. I had come home early from an event in an effort to do something responsible: email. I was on the road and knew the situation would be dire (since I had not been checking my email all day). I was wrong. It was a disaster. It may as well have been Inbox Trillion. There was no wayI could get through it all with my sanity intact. So I did the only logical thing. I quit email.

It was both an experiment and a statement. I decided that I wasn’t going to respond to email for an entire month. And while I did cheat a little (I would still check it from time-to-time in case of emergencies and to delegate some work-related items that couldn’t wait), it was without question one of the best months I’ve ever had.

I was decidedly less stressed out. I found myself enjoying the internet more. I no longer dreaded opening up my laptop or looking at the push notifications on my phone. And guess what? If someone really needed to talk with me about something, they figured out a way. Funny how that works.

And yet, the good times couldn’t last. The month came to a close and I was back on email. While I don’t think I actually missed anything in my time away, the sheer ubiquity of the medium and the realities of life brought email back into my life full time.

And I hate it more than ever.

In the months and now years following the experiment, a number of people have asked for an update on my epic battle with email. The good news is that a few things have gotten much better. The bad new is that everything else has gotten much worse.

After my experiment, I tried a bunch of different things to make my email situation more tenable. What I ended up coming to was a system where I would be checking email constantly throughout a day, responding to what I could quickly from my phone, archiving anything that didn’t need a response, and keeping the rest in my inbox until late at night, when the incoming volume would drop to near zero. Anything that wasn’t timely would then sit in my inbox until the weekend when the incoming volume is uniformly lower.

It was a bit like letting pressure build up (quite literally, you might say) and releasing a bit of it at night so my inbox wouldn’t explode. And then releasing the rest of it every weekend. And then starting over on Monday. Every Monday. Forever.

This was my life. And while it was manageable, you know what? It still sucked. Because I would find myself getting gradually more and more stressed out throughout the week as I saw my inbox grow and grow leading up to the weekend release. It made me more stressed out on Friday than on Monday. I now somewhat dreaded the weekend. Email time.

Then one day a CrunchFund portfolio company asked to run an idea by me. That company,Orchestra, was planning to take what they had learned from their to-do list app and make a new kind of email client. That, of course, became Mailbox.

From the moment I first heard the idea, I knew it was a winner. It was essentially taking a lot of what I was manually doing with email and streamlining the process. And they were doing it in an extremely smart and even sort of fun way, using the native niceties of modern smartphones.

Mailbox quickly became my most-used app. It still is. It basically alleviates the pressure build-up in my inbox by allowing me to release it constantly throughout a day. Brilliant.

But also sort of an illusion.

I’m not alleviating the pressure by responding to emails right away. Instead, I’m pushing them off to deal with at a later time. My system of responding to emails at night or on the weekend is largely the same, I simply no longer have to watch those emails build up until I am ready to take action.

Now, don’t underestimate how wonderful such a system is. And it’s a system that will continue to improve with automations and the like now that Mailbox has the resources of Dropbox behind them. But don’t be fooled into thinking that the problems of email have been solved. The underlying issues very much remain.

Mailbox simply perfected the game of Whac-A-Mole that we all play.

One major issue that remains with email is the notion that every message should get a response. And a big reason why I hate responding to email during the day is that too many people are too quick to respond to my reponses. For every email I send in the day, I seem to get two in return — often immediately. (As a result, this caged animal has been learning not to touch the electric fence — hence, night and weekend emailing.) And a large number of those responses are “K” or “Cool” or “Great” or “Thx” or some other banality best left unemailed.

The problem with these responses, even the short ones, is that they all take time to consume. If I read them in Gmail, it takes a couple seconds to load the response. And then another couple seconds to archive it. If I read them on my phone, I have to wait a few more seconds to download the messages from the server. Not to mention the push notifications that come in alerting you to the new message, taking up yet more precious seconds.

Seconds make up minutes, which make up hours, which make up days, which make up months, which make up years. One day we’ll all be laying on our death beds wishing we hadn’t wasted all that time reading a million “K” email responses in our lives.

Email needs some sort of quick response or maybe even a no-response reply system. Maybe it’s read/unread states that all recipients can see. But that’s been tried before and understandably, some people don’t like others to know when they’ve read a message. So maybe it needs to be a simple checkmark, like Path recently introduced in its new messaging system.

Or maybe the answer is something like emoji/smilies/stickers. Believe me, I know how lame this must sound. I mean, stickers for Chrissakes?! But ignore the immense cuteness and joy of stickers for a second and focus on what they signify: an ultra-quick way to express a reaction. This could work for email too.

Neither of these things would work if they simply came in the form of yet another email response — thus, defeating the purpose. Rather, these should be in the form of some sort of quick-loading visual cue that resides *on top* of an email system. That would likely require everyone using the same email service (unless this somehow became a new standard that every email service provider adopted — not gonna happen). But perhaps a fall-back system could be put in place to deliver these quick messages in email form if the recipient isn’t using the correct email service (giving them an incentive to sign up).

I guess my point is that while we’re seeing a lot of services come out with new and interesting ways to combat email overload — beyond Mailbox, see: Handle, Triage, Evomail, Mail Pilot, and many others — the only way email ever truly gets “fixed” is to be completely re-imagined. It doesn’t need a paint job, it needs a demolition job.

My fear is that this will never happen. We’ll keep getting better tools to handle email on various devices (on your iPhone, on your iPad, on your iWatch, on Google Glass, etc) but eventually the moles will become too quick and plentiful for any of us to whack.

At that point, email will become something we only use for work while we use some other quick messaging system for everything else. This is already happening to some extent — when was the last time you sent an email for “fun”? — but the messaging world is increasingly fragmented and not universal.

 

By, MG SIEGLER

Email Overload: Fighting a Forest Fire with a Bucket!

Our inboxes are getting bigger, and managing email is demanding more time out of our workdays. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and overburdened, but new technology is making it possible to prioritize incoming messaging to reclaim the productivity that online communications had promised us.

Email is relentless as the primary form of business communication and is expected to stay that way with volume growing in double digits every year, according to Radicati Group. Some analysts project that social media could replace email, but it has thus far just cluttered up already busy inboxes with a near constant stream of notifications and updates. The time challenge may be further compounded by the result of downsizing and employees being asked to take on more work and hence more email.

Attempting to tame email overload without using the right tools is akin to fighting a forest fire with a bucket. As it is, many workers already spend a third of their email time before and after working hours processing email, and attempting to manually manage email just compounds the productivity problem.

What options do we have? One solution that defies common sense is “zero inbox” — regularly emptying your inbox to no emails left. Making an empty inbox a goal in itself seems like a huge time waster. Imagine your epitaph; he died with an empty inbox. The fabled management guru Peter Drucker wrote: “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things. There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

Your time is a zero-sum game. There should be better things to do in life than cleaning out one’s inbox.

Constantly checking your email destroys productivity. Study results vary, but one minute of interruption can cost between 15 to 24 minutes of productivity. Other actions for managing the inbox merely act as temporary remedies, i.e. swiping emails into one folder or another, not responding to CC’d emails, or programming complex filters that must be constantly updated as things change. Our client data shows that 19% or more of important email is never read and 36% or more of unimportant email is read – even when multiple techniques are being used to handle email overload. Clearly, new technology is needed.

The solution to email overload must address two key behavioral drivers for managing email; uncertainty that there may be an important email in the inbox, and fear there will be disastrous consequences if there is a late or no response. That solution is email prioritization that is automatic and dynamic.

We live in the age of “smart” technology. Smart drives many things from airplanes to electronic trading to appliances. Smart also works for learning from your email behavior to automatically and dynamically prioritize your email in multiple levels. Best practices for managing time that include systems such as Getting Things Done (GTD), 7 habits, and the Pomodoro Method, all emphasize the importance of setting priorities and planning actions. What if our inbox could do that for us?

Using smart technology to apply best practices managing email is the only effective way to take back control of the inbox and our work lives. Convert the forest fire into a campfire.

 

BY MANISH SOOD, MESSAGEMIND

How Email Is Swallowing Our Lives!

One day several zillion years from now, when aliens from a faraway planet try to make sense of our long-defunct civilization, they’re going to be convinced that e-mail came before the telephone. How else to explain our reliance on something so time-consuming, enervating, and maddeningly inefficient when we could all dispense with our most basic tasks — and coordinate them, for that matter — with a brief phone call?

But that’s not how it happened, of course, and that’s not what we do. Last week, lawyers for Steve Cohen, the CEO of SAC Capital, which was indicted last week,* said their client had failed to notice insider trading within his company because he received 1,000 e-mails per day — and therefore missed a crucial warning missive alerting him that something shady was afoot. How plausible it is that he didn’t know about these shenanigans is highly debatable (okay, it’s implausible), but in the abstract, the idea that Cohen couldn’t keep pace with the furious activity in his in-box doesn’t feel like a stretch. Even those of us without a Hamptons estate and an estimated net worth of $9.3 billion regard our e-mail in the same way Mickey Mouse viewed that army of brooms and buckets in Fantasia’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice“: an unstoppable force that will soon drown us.

And we’re not imagining it. According to a 2012 study from McKinsey Global Institute, the average worker in the knowledge economy spends 28 percent of his or her time reading and answering e-mail. Doing the math, that comes to 11.2 hours per week, if one assumes a 40-hour workweek. This figure is nothing compared to the time we feel like we’re spending on e-mail, either; Mimecast, an e-mail management company, surveyed roughly 2,500 of its clients that same year and asked them how much of their workday was devoted to contending with their e-mail, and the average answer was 50 percent. (“One thousand e-mails per day wouldn’t strike me as uncommon,” adds Barry Gill, Mimecast’s senior product marketing manager, when I asked him about Steve Cohen. “I’m middle management working for a relatively small start-up, and until recently, I got roughly 500 messages per day. Mainly from customers.”)

The conventional wisdom may be that our e-mail use is going down. And among younger people, that’s true, as instant messaging and communication through social networks replaces it. But not at the office. According to the Radicati Group, a technology market research firm, Americans received 75 business e-mails per day in 2012 — only a small fraction of which were spam, by the way — and sent 35. Those numbers are expected to increase, respectively, to 87 and 42 by 2016.

Yet only 42 percent of those messages are considered important, according to Dmitri Leonov, one of the founders of SaneBox, a service that helps filter e-mails. And if efficiency is what we care about, here’s an especially depressing finding from his company’s research: It takes 67 seconds to recover from each e-mail we receive.

E-mails, after all, are disruptive. It takes start-up energy to read them; it takes energy to reorient and reboot once we’re returned to the task we’ve left. Over the course of a week, the price can be measured in hours. If, as the Radicati group says, we receive 75 messages per day (and SaneBox’s is similar, putting the number at 70), we spend nearly an hour and a half each day simply clearing our heads from all the correspondence we receive. “At some point,” says Leonov, “we have to understand this process is hurting us.”

The spooky part is, this irrepressible need we feel to monitor our e-mail accounts may be harder to control than we think. Nancy Darling, an Oberlin psychologist, points out in a 2011 blog post that the ever-refreshing content in our in-boxes caters to our “orienting response,” or human bias toward novelty (a survival instinct, no doubt — leopard over there!). In general, the human brain finds text irresistible: She mentions the Stroop effect, a psychology chestnut in which the word for one color is printed in another — for instance, the word red written in blue ink. If test-takers are asked to identify what color the word’s printed in, they hesitate. But they have no trouble identifying what the word says. Reading words onscreen is almost always easier and more alluring than a task requiring deeper analysis.

So we’re hooked. Last year, an online study by Harris Interactive found that 30 percent of us check our phones while we’re at dinner, and 54 percent of us look at them while lying in bed. (Nine percent even look at them during religious services, a fact I simply adore.) The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story in 2010 by an academic who declared e-mail her “third shift” (a wink to Arlie Hochschild, the sociologist who famously dubbed the child-care portion of a working woman’s day “the second shift” in her groundbreaking 1989 work by the same name). Spelunking through academic databases, I’ve since seen doctoral theses of the same name, examining the same idea.

And Leonov is right: We should consider how this is affecting us. In fact, some researchers already have. In 2008, the consultant Linda Stone coined the term “email apnea” to describe our physiological response to reading e-mails (namely, shallow breathing or holding our breath), postulating we unconsciously enter fight-or-fight mode while doing it. Last year, Gloria Mark, a professor in UC Irvine’s department of informatics, showed that people who took “email vacations” were much likely to have variable heart rates than a sustained heart rate on high alert. (Guess which state is better for you.)

We seem to be paying an economic penalty for this extra work, as well as a physiological one. In 2012, the number of lawsuits filed against companies for forcing overtime work without pay was up 32 percent from 2008, according toUSA Today, and much of the reason, the story concluded, was that workers were now forced to spend untold hours responding to e-mails. (A typical example, from a sergeant in the Chicago PD who filed a class-action lawsuit: “Allen … says he got a near-constant barrage of e-mails, text messages and calls on his department-issued BlackBerry until around 10 p.m. every weeknight. Each required a response lasting from a minute to an hour or two.”)

Indeed, the only person who seems not to be a hostage to his e-mail is Steve Cohen.

It perhaps stands to reason: Barry Gill, of Mimecast, says the real problem with e-mail overload isn’t for overlords like Cohen, but “someone who’s further down the management chain. Because they don’t have the resources or political and managerial clout to call for help.” In January, Bill Gates told theToday show that he only has to look at 40 to 50 messages per week.

But you’d be surprised. On Quora, the immensely popular community-based question-and-answer website, someone once posted the question, How do bigwigs like Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page handle their huge volumes of e-mail traffic? Here, by far, was the most intriguing response, from a fellow claiming to be a high-frequency trader, by the name of David Shin:

When I worked at Google in 2006/2007, Larry and Sergey held a Q&A session, and this exact question was asked of them. One of them answered (I don’t remember which) … “When I open up my email, I start at the top and work my way down, and go as far as I feel like. Anything I don’t get to will never be read. Some people end up amazed that they get an email response from a founder of Google in just 5 minutes. Others simply get what they expected (no reply).”

Maybe Cohen followed a similar practice.

 

 

• By Jennifer Senior

30 Years Ago: How Email Rose to Become the No. 1 Killer App

The first email was sent in 1965. Since then, more than 3 billion email accounts exist and about 294 billion emails are sent per day.

When the first personal computers started being sold by Apple and IBM in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was common for people to ask: “Why do you really need to buy a PC?”

 

The truth was, if you had a typewriter, that’s pretty much all you needed to create documents. If you wanted to play video games, you’d go down to the mall. If you needed to do math problems, you got a calculator.

 

Back then, everybody existed in what we now call data silos. People did home finances on PCs, wrote documents and printed them out, and played a few simple games. Few computers were connected, and those that were invariably belonged to high-security government agencies such as the military or corporate enterprises doing business with government that had access to central mainframe computers.

 

Ethernet networking was invented in the 1970, and IBM introduced Token Ring networking in the 1980s. But few enterprises had good business reasons to install Local Area Networks (LANs) before the mid-1980s, when personal computers became common in corporate offices.

In 1982, IBM introduced PROFS, for Professional Office SystemVM, which ran on IBM mainframes and some of its midrange computer systems and included an email application. For Digital Equipment Corp. minicomputer systems, email service was provided through the company’s All-In-1 office productivity package.

In the early days, before the development of PCs, there were no readily available desktop software applications that could be used to send messages from one person’s desktop computer to another outside of those internal wired networks. But that situation would soon change in the mid-1980s when many enterprises started to rapidly install and expand LANs.

 Popular LAN email packages that emerged in this period included Microsoft Mail, which would eventually become part of the Microsoft Office suite, along with Word Perfect Office, cc:Mail, Banyan Vines and eventually Lotus Notes.

Email Was Simple, and It Worked

So how did electronic mail, which two generations after it first appeared is still considered the No. 1 killer app in the computer business, get started? Easy: It was simple, and it worked—well, most of the time. Email still has hiccups today, but not very often. NetHistory.info explains it this way:

 “Email is much older than ARPANet or the Internet. It was never invented; it evolved from very simple beginnings. Early email was just a small advance on what we know these days as a file directory; it just put a message in another user’s directory in a spot where they could see it when they logged in. Simple as that. Just like leaving a note on someone’s desk.”

 In 2012, it was estimated there were more than 3 billion email accounts in the world, and that about 294 billion emails were sent per day. Roughly 78 percent of those were spam.

Messaging from smartphones and other computers is replacing email among many younger users, but email is still by far the No. 1 “killer app” for businesses. And it probably will remain No. 1 for a long time to come.

 But how did we get to this point in a scant two generations? As with many of the computer technologies we take for granted, email began with a few early experiments at research centers during the -960s.

 First Email Was Sent in 1965

Most likely the first email system of this type was sent from Mailbox, an application used internally at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1965. Another early program to send messages on the same computer was called SNDMSG.

From those first in-house messages, electronic mail evolved with these key milestones, as researched by Outlook.com and published by Mashable in 2012:

1971: U.S. programmer Raymond Tomlinson allegedly sent “QWERTYUIOP” as the first network email, and he was the first to connect his computer to his mailbox by using an “@” symbol.

1977: Tomlinson’s emailing method worked for networked computers using the same software, but many people began using the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPA) to connect outside networks.

1981: The American Standard Code for Information Interchange adopted a process of letters, punctuation and symbols to digitally store information.

1985: Government and military employees, students and academic professionals were common email users by the mid-1980s.

1991: ISPs allow widespread Internet access, but there were limited options for use until Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1991.

In 1998, more people signed up for free email accounts on sites such as email.com, Yahoo.com, Excite.com, Hotmail.com and others than all other years previous. Now most people have multiple email accounts. They may have one hosted by a Web service, such as Google (Gmail), Yahoo, AOL or Microsoft; another at their home network, hosted by a telecom or cable television provider; and another on a mobile device, such as a smartphone or tablet.

By the way, “spam” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1998 after its growth in the mid-1990s—not to be confused with the 3.8 cans of spam consumed every second in the United States.

Key Moment in IT History: Email Sent Over the Internet

A key moment in email history came on Nov. 22, 1977, when the first email sent through the then-unnamed “Internet” took place in the foothills near Stanford University, in Portola Valley, Calif.

The museum is housed in a historic building of sorts; it used to serve as the executive business center for Silicon Graphics Inc., which in the 1980s and 1990s was one of the most powerful IT companies in the world.

A side note: SGI was so influential, in fact, that when newly elected President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore visited Silicon Valley soon after their inauguration in February 1993, the first media conference they held was at—you guessed it—SGI.

 The 2007 CHM event was a true reunion of Internet and email superstars. On hand were about 50 of the original pioneers of the Internet, including seven of the eight project leaders. The event was at capacity—about 400 people.

 The project leaders on hand were: Dr. Vint Cerf, then of DARPA and now an evangelist for Google; Don Nielson, retired from SRI International; Bob Kahn, retired from DARPA; Jim Garrett, retired from Collins Radio; Irwin Jacobs, then of Linkabit, now of Qualcomm; Pal Spilling of the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment; and the lone woman on the team, Ginny Strazisar Travers, formerly of BBN.

Each had major input into enabling three computer networks to send data freely to and from each other for the first time.

The transcendent event occurred on Nov. 22, 1977, when email data flowed seamlessly from a refurbished bread truck (which had been rebuilt into a mobile data relay station) on the street in the foothills to a gateway at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, then to a host at the University of Southern California (400 miles away) via London—across three types of networks: packet radio, satellite and the military’s ARPANET.

“We figured the data traveled a total of 8,800 miles as it bounced around two continents,” Cerf said.

It seemed a small event at the time, the Net pioneers recalled. No way could they know that this one seemingly insignificant test would lead to the Internet we all know and can’t live without now.

Email Started the Internet Rolling

And it was a simple email that started the whole thing rolling. Now email is everywhere. Most major social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter and many more) use email as either a main or secondary feature.

A final factoid regarding email of which users ought to be aware: In 2011, a study found that the worst email passwords are “password” and “123456.” Others lame passwords worthy of note include “QWERTY,” “monkey” and “letmein

Stop Stressing: Just Write It Down

Image via Lasse Kristensen/Shutterstock.com

Like all of us, I’ve been crazy busy lately. I’m in graduate school, working part time as a management consultant and recently moved halfway across the country. Since I’m not sitting at a desk all day anymore, my Post-It-Note-Everywhere system of task management isn’t going to cut it. As such, I’ve been searching for some all-encompassing management system to keep track of the deadlines, phone calls, reading assignments and general life-management tasks (that laundry’s gotta get done somehow).

Some of my grad school colleagues are passionate—almost cult-ish, in fact—about David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Allen’s system is based on task context, priority levels and areas of focus for major projects. That seemed too overwhelming for me, but I was sure there was some “golden nugget” of the GTD system that holds everything together, that turns these otherwise normal grad students into GTD gospel-preachers.

I think it’s the notion that writing down all the tasks in your mind frees up brainpower to actually get things done. Instead of worrying about forgetting all the things on your plate, purge them from your brain and just start doing them.

When we turn to psychology, this makes sense. Psychologists call our natural tendency to fixate on all the stuff we have to do the Zeigarnik Effect. And in 2011, two Florida State University psychologists published an article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that showed we don’t necessarily have to complete the task to free our mind of it, we just need a decent plan of how we’re going to complete it. Allen’s system helps us identify this plan.

So here’s the down and dirty of how I’ve adapted Allen’s system to my needs:

• I started by taking the time—a lot of time—to identify all the to-do’s in my inbox, my iPhone reminders, on the sticky notes everywhere, in my calendar, and those just taking space in my brain. It sounds overwhelming, and it is.

• I imported all these tasks into a virtual task management software solution. I use the Toodledo app on my iPhone, iPad, and computer browser. Toodledo is built specifically for GTD, so it includes a ton of features I don’t use. There are a bunch of to-do solutions (Remember the Milk and Things are two of my favorites); which one is best is all based on personal preference.

• As GTD advocates, I broke down major projects to individual tasks. That is, it’s not helpful to add “Finish Memo to Jim” to your task list. Instead, “Interview Pamela”, “Write Executive Summary”, and “Send Memo to Robin for Review” would be better tasks. Remember, psychology tells us we’ll get as much benefit from planning how to complete a task as we do from actually completing it.

• I then looked through all these tasks and identified and removed the stuff I didn’t really have to do (e.g., stuff that may have been important three months ago but doesn’t matter at this point) and separated out the stuff that would be nice to do, but isn’t tied to a deadline (I labeled this stuff “Someday”). This is a super important step.

• Now that everything I need to do is on my Toodledo list, I just add tasks to it as I get them. Right away.

• Every morning, I spend 10 minutes reviewing the list, “starring” the tasks that I need to accomplish that day. Every couple months, I’ll look at the someday tasks and see if they need to be tied to a deadline instead.

• As soon as something is done, I check it off the list. The best part.

  No one system works well for everyone. I’ve tried quite a few myself. Take what works, and modify or toss out what doesn’t. What strategies or tools work best for you?

Gmail Inbox Changes: Good or Bad for Users and Marketers?

Is it time to panic for email marketers? Do you control your Gmail inbox?

Those are just a couple of the many questions flying around the blogosphere lately.

Google has been rolling out significant changes to Gmail since early June, causing anxiety amongst many list owners and users.

For those who missed the update or don’t use the service, Gmail now automatically segments emails into different “tabbed categories” as outlined below.

• Primary: Messages from friends and family, as well as any other messages that don’t appear in other tabs.

• Promotions: Your deals, offers, and other promotional emails.

• Social: Messages from social networks, media-sharing sites, online dating services, gaming platforms, and other social websites.

• Updates: Notifications such as confirmations, receipts, bills, and statements.

• Forums: Messages from online groups, discussion boards, and mailing lists.

Is This a Good or Bad Change for Users?

As with anything, there are pros and cons attached to the new Gmail inbox.

The new inbox does allow one to easily “clean up” and organize emails, in theory. That’s great for users who otherwise feel overwhelmed by their email.

On the other hand, some users (myself included) feel completely capable of determining which emails they want to see without auto-filtering, whether or not the emails are promotional in nature.

Prior to the update, users had plenty of control over their inbox with filters, labels, and spam-marking abilities. At worst, if someone was emailing too often or emailing uninteresting content, unsubscribing in the vast majority of cases was only a click or two away.

Should Email Marketers Be in a Frenzy?

Though it’s a little early to tell what impact the new inbox may have on email open rates, Mailchimp recently published a post claiming open rates were negatively impacted by the change.

If this is the case, there is cause for concern for any business sending promotional emails, as they will likely be caught in Gmail’s Promotions tab. Unless users are adamant about checking that tab, emails could easily be missed.

Some marketers aren’t panicking just yet, however, saying this new layout presents an opportunity to capture even more leads and sales than before, because people who click the Promotions tab are doing so with the knowledge they’re about to read promotional emails. In other words, they’re making a conscious decision to be “open to the sale.”

How To Go Back to the Old Inbox Layout

Users can easily go back to the un-tabbed Gmail inbox for the time being. Eventually, this option probably won’t be available.

To go back to the un-tabbed inbox:

• Click + next to the rightmost tab in your Gmail inbox.

• Make sure all tabs except Primary are not checked under Select tabs to enable.

• Click Save.

Alternatively, if you prefer to keep the tabs, but you want certain promotional emails delivered straight to your Primary inbox, you can simply drag and drop those emails into the Primary tab and Google will “learn” to place future emails from that address in the Primary tab. 

What Are Your Thoughts on the New Gmail? Are you happy with the new Gmail tabbed inbox as a user or an email marketer? What pros and cons do you see?

Author: Jonathan Payne

Obsessive, compulsive, email disorder

Hands up if you checked your work email over the festive period? If you have you are certainly not alone. 77% of people surveyed  admitted  to checking their email “obsessively”.

We are still a nation of people who compulsively check their inbox – in fact shocking statistics by leading email researcher Dr Thomas Jackson proved that 70% of emails are attended to within 6 seconds of their arrival.
 
6 seconds!

We would let a screaming child cry for longer without checking, but we feel compelled to check – and respond to – our emails as soon as we receive them.
 

Is it because technology has advanced to such an extent that we are constantly connected to sources of distraction – such as email? 

Email provides distraction – from work, from life’s other challenges or from making difficult choices.

But we cannot blame technology – the cause for this obsession is human behaviour – and the solution is behavioural too.

What Needs To Change Before You Can Give Up Email Completely?

Few people love email, but it’s a necessity for most. Productivity specialist Claire Burge decided she had enough and ousted it from her life entirely. For many of us, however, that’s easier said than done. What would it take for you to remove email from your life entirely?

Claire was able to accomplish the task by using other methods of communication and the help of an autoresponder:

I started letting people know about my decision and thought it would be the easiest part of the process. It proved to be the hardest. I put a note on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to announce my decision. I put an auto-responder on my email[.]

While communicating through speed-appropriate channels like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites can reduce email volume, we’ve yet to see anyone eliminate it entirely before.

If you don’t like email and would like to have it out of your life, what’s stopping you? Is it your job? Do you like that everything is in one place and would like that with social media sites instead? Let us know in the comments below.

Much Ado About Email: Raise Your Eyebrow (Slightly) About Gmail’s Changes

When word arose about changes the world’s largest email service made to the way it organizes messages, marketers got nervous. It’s OK to get a little worried about the “Promotions” tab, but the real lesson here? Don’t put all your eggs in a single basket.

It’s both deeply ironic and extremely telling that an email about declining open rates received one of the highest click rates the Associations Now Daily News has ever gotten in its 10 months of existence.

The most-skilled email marketers are effective at turning lemons into lemonade by putting their ears to the ground, adapting to the data they see, and incrementally tuning their approach.

But of the roughly 23 percent of readers that opened Thursday’s email newsletter, 40 percent clicked on a link (an extremely high number for a daily newsletter), and the story that got the most clicks, by a wide margin, was Anita Ferrer’s piece about the effects of Gmail’s “Promotions” tab on marketing messages.

Associations live and breathe email marketing, so the clicks clearly showed a little collective concern. And there are other signs that Gmail’s move has savvy email marketers worried:

• Chris Brogan, the founder and CEO of Human Business Works (and a genius at writing emails that are at once pitchy and conversational), sent an email to his subscribers in the middle of the week—off his normal Sunday morning schedule—just to tell people how to ensure his emails weren’t getting buried in the promotions folder. “Not too long ago, Gmail decided to help you by creating a ‘promotions’ tab where they like to stuff newsletters and the like,” he wrote. “As a result, you might not have seen newsletters from me over the past few weeks. Believe me, I’m sending them.” For me, the email showed up in the … I don’t even have to say it.
• Silicon Valley icon Jason Calacanis, whose excellent LAUNCH newsletter is loose in structure and filled with his pointed commentary, suggests that Google’s goal may be to begin charging those who want to give premium play to marketing messages. “A conspiracy theorist would say Google’s new Gmail filtering of marketing messages is their attempt to kill one of the few advertising mediums they don’t control,” he writes. (There’s some evidence to support Calacanis’ argument: Users have complained about ads that suspiciously look like emails inside the “Promotions” tab.)
• There’s already a counter-narrative in the works. Speaking to MediaPost, email marketing expert Len Shneyder argues that the issue is going to solve itself with the rise of mobile messaging. “Gmail opens will be offset given the number of IMAPed mobile devices that do the opening and bypass the new inbox,” he tells Jordan Cohen. Cohen says that savvy email marketers will start dynamically swapping out content in real time in an effort to outsmart the folders. “Yes, my email marketing brothers and sisters: Our cheese has been moved,” Cohen writes. “The question is, will you move with it?”

Now, is this really something to get stressed over? It depends. You know your members, you know your stats, and you (should) know where your readers are reading your content.

Earlier this year, Associations Now‘s Katie Bascuas spotlighted  Informz’s 2013 Association Email Marketing Benchmark Report, and its findings back Shneyder’s statement—more people are reading emails on their mobile devices than they are on desktops.

And to take things a step further, the most-skilled email marketers are effective at turning lemons into lemonade by putting their ears to the ground, adapting to the data they see, and incrementally tuning their approach. That’s why someone who’s had an opportunity to work on an email newsletter for a couple of years is such a natural at it.

But even on mobile, users are already trying to sort through the mishmash of marketing messages. Whether it’s Mailbox or Cloze or some other piece of software, the tension between the need to raise one’s voice and the need to cut one’s noise isn’t going away anytime soon.

Email is our online bread and butter, and it simply works. But if it’s your main way of reaching members, there’s a really good argument to be made for diversifying your approach so that you’re not completely reliant on one medium. Maybe it’s social media. Maybe it’s an app with regular notifications. Maybe you pick up the phone a little more. But nervousnesses over a high-profile change by the world’s largest email service shouldn’t be the catalyst for this. You should be making bandwidth for these alternatives as a general rule.

When major players in the email game like Constant Contact and MailChimp are raising yellow (if not red) flags about the Gmail change, it’s certainly worth taking an Alka-Seltzer over.

But it’s up to you—and your fellow stakeholders—whether you treat it as indigestion or go into panic mode.

By Ernie Smith

Overwhelmed by Email? Tips to Get Organized

 

(StatePoint) As more of our correspondence takes place electronically — from shopping to banking statements to love letters — it can be easy to get overwhelmed by the influx of email received on a daily basis.

Experts say that an organized inbox can save you time and keep you productive, both personally and professionally.

“An organized inbox represents an organized life,” says Josh Rosenwald, CEO of Unroll.me, a tool for consolidating email.

To help, Rosenwald is offering a few tricks to make email work better for you:

Keywords

When sending emails, pay attention to your subject line – it will help you in the long run. Don’t just use a generic greeting as a subject. Get specific instead.

By being specific in the subject line of your email and in the body of the text, you can make your emails and threads more searchable later when you need them. Referencing past emails is a great way to find information you need quickly, such as phone numbers or the details of an upcoming event or appointment. Just be sure to always spell your keywords correctly and consistently.  

Declutter

“Purchase a few things online; sign up for a few newsletters and before you know it, your inbox will be cluttered with mass marketing emails, many of which will be totally irrelevant to you,” says Rosenwald.

Instead of sorting through the mess, consider using a service like Unroll.me, which can help you streamline your messages. Unroll.me works by searching your inbox for marketing emails, compiling them daily and giving you the option of automatically unsubscribing with a single click or adding the email to your “Daily Rollup,” a single email that functions like an electronic catalog organized by categories, such as travel, shopping, health and beauty. You can even choose what time of day the “Daily Rollup” arrives.

Unroll.me supports Gmail, Google apps and Yahoo Mail. More information can be found at www.unroll.me.

Don’t Wait

While you won’t be able to tend to every item in your inbox instantaneously, there are plenty of emails that require no more than a one-sentence response.

“There’s no sense in letting these quick action items pile up to the point where they eventually feel unmanageable,” advises Rosenwald. “It will help you feel productive to take care of these smaller tasks right away.”

Whether you use a “to-do” folder in your inbox or a flagging system, be sure to stay organized with those emails you are putting off for later. It can be all too easy to forget they exist.

Just as you wouldn’t let your physical mail pile up, so too should you handle your emails promptly and efficiently.

Photo Credit: (c) Robtek – Fotolia.com