The following article is written by Josep William Widjaja, one of Bina Nusantara International University’s lecturers. He likes reading any book or magazine that talks about IT world, and listening to jazz. His interests are IT implementation on business and marketing, web and mobile development, and infrastructure.
Email often predicted, sooner or later, to be forgotten by everyone, considering other means of modern communication technology keep emerging.
As a simple example, communicating through mobile platform nowadays are more into BBM (BlackBerry Messenger – a huge hit for Indonesian) or WhatsApp that bridges communication between smartphone users; not to mention web based communication means, we have Social Media like Facebook message, Twitter message and other networking websites. People tend to think that communicating through such means are more personal and direct, trendier, and less hassle. In other words, more effective and efficient than email.
I’m not saying such opinion is wrong, however in e-commerce we will encounter different fact. Recently a survey by SeeWhy Research showed that email is still “Number One” in pushing traffic and conversion in online buy-and-sell world, Conversion is a measurement, often called matrix, defined as percentage of visitors that brings or solves actions, and in this case conversion refers to transactions.
Diagram (right side) shows e-commerce’s conversion distribution. As we can see, email dominates 67% conversion compares to the second, third, and fourth place: direct traffic, (23.68%), search engines (3.68%) , and social media (2.11%).
It is no wonder if we take a good look at online websites nowadays. In retail websites, daily deals websites, and other e-commerce websites we will find that there’s always a place dedicated to sign up for a newsletter.
From small scale up to larger scale of business, they keep investing in email marketing. Because email still have its place as an effective way to communicate important information and support critical business objective – turning visiting traffic into transactions.
On the other hand, I think we all agree that email is a part of our lives. In my class, when I asked who has no email address, and if there’s one hand raised, whoever it is, he/she will be a laughingstock. Not having an email is like you were born only yesterday or modern ABG (slang for old and conservative people) .
In Indonesia, email is really potential, because it is easy to create and accessible anytime anywhere. Especially considering that many Indonesian has internet connected smartphone, and monitoring mailbox 24/7 becomes very easy.
So let us congratulate email The Champion and keep your productivity enjoyable and provide added value service to many.
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