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Jun 24, 2008

The workplace and the e-mail trail

Ever wonder whether your boss can see what you write in your work e-mails? Companies large and small are monitoring employee e-mail, looking for everything from proprietary data leaks to cyberslacking.

E-mail and other electronic communications have dramatically changed the contemporary legal landscape. By some estimates, more than 90 percent of the cost of a lawsuit today can come from sorting through e-mails and other electronic documents to determine which ones are relevant to the case.

Ken Withers, director of judicial education at a legal think tank called The Sedona Conference, says that 20 years ago, a case that involved 300,000 pieces of paper was considered huge.

"That's considered a drop in the bucket today," Withers says. "The equivalent of 30 million or 300 million pieces of paper, if these were printed out, would not be unusual." More...

Jun 20, 2008

E-mail is at risk of killing its own usefulness

Daily e-mail volume is now at 210 billion a day worldwide and increasing, according to The Radicati Group, a market research firm.

The burden of managing all that e-mail has prompted a backlash. Many admit the distraction makes it near impossible to get work done, or even socialize normally.

Companies are coming up with both behavioral and technical answers to the e-mail overload issue. Some major companies, like Intel, discourage the use of the "reply all" feature, which generates lots of extra mail. Other companies try to enforce "e-mail-free Fridays." More...

Jun 8, 2008

What is the future of e-mail?

An old digital format still has plenty of life left. Compared with today's virtual worlds, e-mail is solidly Web 1.0 —an almost archaic communication channel. Yet e-mail works, and marketers and advertisers keep putting it to new uses.

Moreover, consumers —whose opinions are the ones that matter— genuinely like e-mail. Nearly three-quarters of adult e-mail users in North America said they used it every day, according to an April survey conducted by Ipsos for Habeas.

Two-thirds of adult respondents said they preferred e-mail for communicating with businesses. Just as many —and this is the important part— said they expected to still prefer e-mail five years from now.

That is not to say that consumers are ready for random, untargeted e-mail. Opt-in is still key. Consumers are even willing to help marketers custom-tailor their messages.

More than 88% of respondents said they would like more choices in e-mail content and frequency, including options on advertisements and special offers.

So if e-mail is set to remain a consumer favorite for the next several years, that must mean e-mail ad spending will grow during that time, right? Yes and no.

eMarketer predicts that e-mail ad spending in the US will hit $492 million this year, then increase by 55% to $765 million by 2012.

And while e-mail accounts for only about 2% of all online ad spending, eMarketer predicts that percentage will actually drop to only 1.5% of online ad spending in 2012, despite the growth in dollars spent. The amount spent on other formats will dwarf what is spent on e-mail, thanks to its low cost.

E-mail is cheap marketing. The pricing scales well, too: The cost of sending a million e-mails is little more than the cost of sending a thousand. However, this can also cause problems.

"E-mail is so inexpensive that it lulls many marketers into underestimating its influence on entire campaigns and a company's brand," said David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer.