E-mail and business

Definition Electronic messages sent or received over a computer network and stored on the network until read

E-mail has replaced voice and physical mail as the primary means of communication in many businesses. It has spawned support industries that earn billions of dollars per year.

Electronic mail, or e-mail, started in 1965 as a way for users who were time-sharing a single mainframe computer to communicate with one another. The ability to communicate with others who were on different time schedules was of immense value, and the technology was soon expanded to allow users to pass messages between different servers. Although initially e-mail was used in government and research institutions, businesses soon adopted it when the benefits became evident.

Much of the business world relies on communication between parties in separate physical locations. E-mail provides a fast and efficient method of information exchange at little cost per message. It also eliminates the need for communicating parties to interface with one another at the same time, as is required in telephone calls or teleconferences.

E-mail technology’s savings in time alone was enough to motivate most businesses to adopt the technology as a standard medium of communication. As the medium developed, the ability to store and quickly access e-mail messages as well as attached documents, files, and other information provided new valuable functions and created more cost savings for companies. E-mail quickly became such a vital resource that many business professionals are estimated to spend up to 50 percent of their working time using e-mail. In fact, many analysts see modern businesses as almost dangerously reliant on e-mail for communication; many studies have found that Internet-based businesses stand to lose tens of thousands of dollars per hour if there is an outage of their e-mail servers. The drop in communications can also reduce the ability of workers to complete their tasks, resulting in a loss of person-hours and damaging customer relations. Psychological and sociological studies have also questioned the impact of many employees' near-constant connection to work through e-mail, as the technology brings the expectation of rapid response to any communication and therefore potentially increased stress. Nevertheless, companies' use of e-mail continues to grow, with an increasing focus on effective use of mobile platforms such as smartphones and tablet computers.

While e-mail has proven vital to the operations of most businesses, the e-mail industry itself has grown into a major branch of Internet-based business. Companies providing e-mail services, such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft, compete for users by designing e-mail features to be easily compatible with their other products. Each e-mail interface, whether its own program or accessed through a Web browser, provides different details that may appeal to the specific needs of the user; some elements may also be customizable on the individual level. The design, construction, sales, and maintenance of the servers needed to sustain e-mail operations have also developed into a significant industry.

E-mail Marketing

Businesses have also capitalized on the ability to mass market to consumers via e-mail as part of their wider Internet marketing strategies. More customers can be reached at little or no cost by e-mail than by previous outreach methods such as telephone calls and traditional media advertising. The business of selling lists of e-mail addresses has become a staple of the mass-mailing industry generating millions of dollars. Another method is the use of opt-in lists, in which consumers voluntarily choose to receive e-mails from companies they are interested in. This helps companies ensure their e-mails and marketing materials are reaching customers rather than going undelivered or ignored. Such e-mails (often composed and sent automatically) may often include promotional offers or exclusive information as an incentive for consumers to sign up, expanding the company's advertising audience and providing other valuable statistics about its customers that can be used to further develop effective marketing strategies.

In 2014, marketing company Adestra's eighth annual e-mail marketing industry census found that e-mail marketing was the dominant marketing strategy and offered the largest return on investment, even as the field continued to evolve. Increasingly, businesses focus on making their e-mail efforts compatible and effective with mobile devices such as the smartphones and tablets used by more and more consumers. As data collection and advanced metric analysis becomes more sophisticated, e-mail marketing has also moved towards providing a higher level of personalization, with content tailored towards the interest of each recipient.

Despite the success of mass e-mailing as a marketing tool, it has created problems as well as business opportunities. Unsolicited commercial e-mail, commonly called “spam,” comes from a business or individual misusing the system. Spam has the potential to clog users’ e-mail inboxes, wasting valuable work hours that must be spent separating important messages from unwanted advertisements. An industry quickly arose aimed at blocking spam, based around spam filter programs using statistical methods to weed out undesirable e-mails. Several countries have even passed laws in attempts to combat rampant spam e-mailing, including the US CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 and the Canada Anti-Spam Law that became effective in 2014, which often require that commercial e-mails include the ability for recipients to unsubscribe from the mailing list.

The ability to attach files to e-mail messages has also led to the propagation of computer viruses, another potential danger to businesses that rely on computers. The need to guard against these problems, however, has itself spawned another industry that makes billions of dollars per year on computer security efforts.

Bibliography

Cortada, James W. The Digital Hand: How Computers Changed the Work of American Manufacturing, Transportation, and Retail Industries. Oxford, England: Oxford U P, 2004. Print.

"Email Marketing Industry Census 2014." Econsultancy. Econsultancy.com, 2015. Web. 4 Mar. 2015.

Hughes, Arthur Middleton. "Why Email Marketing Is King." Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business, 21 Aug. 2012. Web. 4 Mar. 2015

Nussey, Bill. The Quiet Revolution in E-Mail Marketing. New York: IUniverse, 2004. Print.

Okin, J. R. The Internet Revolution: The Not-for-Dummies Guide to the History, Technology, and Use of the Internet. Winter Harbor: Ironbound, 2005. Print.