Email continues to be the most important online medium for staying in continuous contact with customers. Groupon has made a name for itself as a major player in e-commerce in part due to their success in convincing over 83 million people to subscribe to their daily email feed.
The usefulness of email is not limited to live shopping e-commerce models such as Groupon. Private shopping clubs like Vente Privée survive and thrive by regularly contacting their customers at the most demographically common point still existing in 2011: the email inbox.
The success of Groupon and similar companies validate that email is still today an enormously important pillar of e-commerce. But behind this predictable conclusion is a mid-term observation that can be easily overlooked.
Take the example of a standard user, who has a penchant for one or the other social commerce offer. Let’s say that the user is registered on Groupon and Daily Deal and is a member of Vente Privée. This would mean that the user might be receiving 2 emails from each online service daily. That means that six sales-related emails every day are coming across a medium which is primarily intended for communication. You don’t need a lot of imagination to come to the conclusion that the user probably won’t be signing up for any other e-commerce services which are also sending out their offerings per daily emails.
The more successful Groupon and its competitors become today, the more difficult it will be for the businesses of tomorrow to use this channel.
On the flipside, Facebook is already demonstrating that email may not be the only channel of the future which can reach all demographic layers where they are. This topic was covered in Marcel Weiss’ presentation on the Social Web Pattern in E-commerce at this year’s Live Shopping Days Conference: from the end user perspective on news and deals, Facebook’s newsfeed is a distant relative of email. True, email was and still is the ultimate inbox. But at least now some other options are starting to become available. Groupon Berlin has already over 20,000 people who are seeing their daily deals via Facebook.
When online merchants move away from simply mapping analog concepts to the digital world and instead develop digitally native services and business models, the need for old-fashioned email starts to decline.
What kind of strategic recommendations can be drawn from this?
If you are building a service which will potentially require daily interaction with customers (such as live shopping models), you should integrate email into your sales model and invest a significant sum of energy into optimizing this channel. Even Facebook supplements their newsfeed promotion of their Social Deals with emails.
At the same time, a mid-term strategy is required using newsfeeds from social networks as a supplementary channel. Finally, the long term strategy needs to strive for a practical alternative or parallel channel which can function completely independent of email. Because, as described above, the acceptance level of the end user for using regular email is severely limited.
Groupon for example has already begun their mobile offensive, which should provide a degree of independence from the email medium.
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Originally posted in German by Marcel Weiss, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.
