It’s hard to beat, yet is often described as a curse. It’s incredibly flexible and it is always there for you. It’s like a very loyal friend who looks after everything you are interested in and who makes sure that if you are not interested in something, shoos it away. You can switch it off but you can’t get away from it. It keeps getting better because it adapts to other new ways to communicate but it never says it is the cool way to communicate. It’s like a loyal dog.

Email is all of the above and it gets better. We all hate SPAM and I certainly notice a lot less of it because the filters are getting better all of the time. But, with the arrival of Google’s ‘Buzz’ service this week, which integrates with your Gmail account, Google has moved email from being a service which just receives and sends your information using the ‘To’ and ‘From’ commands, to something that keeps you abreast of what your friends and contacts are doing on via their Twitter, blogging or photo sharing websites.

And this development just highlights how important email is to us these days and how it should be treated because, despite all of the latest social media tools that we use to communicate, it all comes down to using email in a way that treats the receiver in the way that you would like to be treated yourself.

In other words, it’s not just about personalising an email to someone by putting their name, albeit that this is very important. No, it’s much more about individualisation. If you know what people are interested in, not just because they have told you what they like, but by what you also think they would like to know about.

So much email communication these days is personalised but not individualised and many email marketing systems fail to help marketers to do anything other than just send out generic emails to a mass of people.

If you are considering an email marketing system, then you have to ask some pretty demanding questions of the vendor. Such as how the system can help you reach your customers with information they want to read and have asked to be sent, while learning about their habits so you can send them information that you think they might like.

We spend a lot of time adapting email marketing systems from being able to send personalised emails to sending individualised emails. It makes a big difference and customers are treated like loyal friends rather than mere receivers of information.

Tim O'Reilly has written a good post about Google Buzz and how he thinks it is 'game changing'.


Will Hawkins
New Business Director