It’s virtually impossible to buy anything, and especially online, without giving an email address these days. Barely a day goes by when my inbox isn’t inundated with a series of alerts for things I’ve expressed interest in (or have even purchased) over the years in the hope of drawing me to a sale.
There’s no denying that there are attractive advantages to businesses in running email campaigns; they’re cheap, certainly. Add into that tracking, and you can harness all kinds of analytics, which sounds very attractive to me as a businessman, but then… who actually clicks on these things?
Someone must do, and I assume it’s the usual numbers-game rules.
For years I’ve merely switched webmail provider, and given out a spam-specific mailer to nearly everyone, in the hope of keeping my account clean for wanted content, but then – I barely communicate with anyone I want to via email these days, with WhatsApp or social media offering much easier and more instant options.
Increasingly then, it feels like email is going much the way of the post; full of leaflets and offers that largely go straight into recycling, a never-ending deluge of paper & electronic text sorting.
