Inbox Insanity or Why 23 May Be Enough
Are your inboxes driving you insane?
Here’s a rather mind-blowing exercise for a Friday that brings home the challenge we face as one-to-one marketers today:
- Close your eyes
- Count how many inboxes you have whether you check them regularly or not
- Be sure to include voicemail, online, and postal inboxes
So, what’s your total? Frankly, I’m a bit overwhelmed with mine — 23!!! Here’s my complete list:
- Postal inbox - home
- Postal inbox - work
- Voicemail inbox - home
- Voicemail inbox- work
- Voicemail inbox - mobile
- SMS/Text inbox - mobile
- Email inbox - work (Outlook)
- Email inbox - personal (Yahoo)
- Email Inbox - personal (Gmail)
- Blog comments inbox - work
- Facebook inbox - personal
- LinkedIn inbox - personal
- Twitter Direct Message inbox - personal
- Twitter Direct Message inbox - work
- YouTube inbox - personal
- YouTube inbox - work
- Flickr inbox - personal
- Banking inbox - personal
- Credit card #1 inbox - personal
- Credit card #2 inbox - personal
- Credit card #3 inbox - personal
- Frequent flyer inbox - personal
- Nintendo Wii inbox - personal
There are several thoughts that jump out at me thanks to this exercise.
First, this is proof positive that I am an unapologetic, online marketing geek. To understand the rapid evolution of digital media, you must consume it. Unfortunately, this list may demonstrate that I’m on the verge of being consumed by my media.
Second, social media tools are a significant driver of inbox inflation. Take Facebook for example. As a spam-fighting measure, it remains a closed-loop email environment — only friends can email friends through Facebook. And yet, Facebook needs its users to have external email accounts because that’s where they send your account information, friend requests, and other notices.
At some point, one has to wonder if Facebook will simply throw open the doors and become an open email environment. Not only would that potentially eliminate one inbox from my list, it could also wake up their entire user base to the notion that they may not need that Yahoo or Gmail account now that Facebook is wide open.
My third observation from this exercise is that the biggest driver of the inbox explosion are those who have been burned by spam, spoofing, and phishing scams the most–the financial services industry. In the interest of increasing security and assuring message delivery, my bank and credit card issuers have begun setting up their own, closed-loop email systems tied to customer accounts.
The upside of this approach is that the bad guys can’t get in. The downside — well, how many of us check our bank account inbox as often as our work or personal email inboxes? My guess is not many. Accordingly, I suspect that what these companies are gaining in security they are losing in terms of immediacy and customer response. After all, I check my work and personal email accounts throughout the day whereas I check my online banking email inbox only two or three times a week when I log into my account — and then, only if I see that I have a message.
I could go on and on, but my prevailing thought is that 23 is enough. In fact, as Dick Van Patten once proclaimed, 8 is enough. What this means, I leave to ponder in a future post as surely I’m going to break Wordpress thanks to the length of this post.
Until then, I encourage you to share via the comments how many inboxes you have these days - and which ones I might have missed. Can you beat 23?
This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 3:50 pm and is filed under Subscribers Rule!, email marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
2 Responses to “Inbox Insanity or Why 23 May Be Enough”
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Interesting post. Indeed, the number of ways people can theoretically reach me grows almost continuously. I’ve been working hard for the last 6-9 months to tie as many of these boxes together as possible.
For example, I use Callwave so that all my voicemail gets transcribed into email and goes to my email inbox. My Twitter DMs go to email, not mobile. My work voicemail forwards to my cellular voicemail, etc.
Even with those measures, I still check three email accounts, 2 voice mail accounts, and 2 postal mail boxes daily.
With regard to Facebook and other walled garden messaging protocols, I believe the more likely scenario is that companies will begin using Facebook (and MySpace and LinkedIn) messaging for commercial purposes, to ensure deliverability. If you are a “friend” of J Crew, I’m much more likely to read a Facebook message from them than a regular email (at least for now).
The eventual commercialization of closed loop email systems will be in full force by next year. I predict this holiday season will see the initial foray.
From a Subscribers Rule perspective, I believe we’re not far away from opt-in forms that include message type (email, mobile, direct mail) and message system (email, Facebook, Twitter). As always, all signs point to a true 1:1 world just around the corner.
Jason Baer
Convince & Convert - Internet consulting for agencies
Blog: http://budurl.com/3xld
Twitter: @jaybaer
October 5th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
So…in the spirit of being Waaay out there….basically where I live anyway. Start thinking about Search as a big inbox.
SEO is really about delivering your message to an address. That address happens to to be the keyword phrase, and the really funny thing is that your message is totally delivered on-demand…when someone asks for that information via a search query.
this is why I think search is the future of corporate communications. As we get overwhelmed by all this inbox crush users are going to be a lot more subjective about who they give access to.
The prevailing attitulde is “I’ll tell you when I need your message”
I know, it’s out there….but make no mistake…it’s out there.
Chris Baggott
Co-founder, ExactTarget
Co-founder, Compendium Blogware
http://blogging.compendiumblog.com/blog/blogging-best-practices
October 6th, 2008 at 3:20 pm