Why do we care so deeply about the inbox?

You encounter plenty of unsolicited communication in your life. Unexpected outreach takes many different forms and a combination of manual and automated defense mechanisms protect us from having to engage when we don't want to. Think about these different modes of contact:

• In public, in person. If you've ever walked down the strip in Las Vegas, you've run into dozens of people passing out paper flyers. Or at the entrance to a shopping mall, a teenager with a clipboard trying to conduct market research. Or in the concourse of an airport, kiosk dwellers selling airline credit cards. Most people avoid eye contact and simply walk on by, while others give a terse "no thanks" and walk on.
• In private, in person. It's a bit different when someone comes to your own house or apartment, asking for a donation for the high school sports team, for you to sign a political petition, buy a magazine subscription, or some combination of the three. A lot of people will look through the peephole or a window and not even answer the door.



• Via mail. Direct mail generates over $4 billion in annual revenue for the US Postal Service. A while back, I ran an advisory session for the USPS and showed a picture with the term "junk mail" on a sign. An executive told me very sternly, "there is no such thing as that term." For the rest of us, the DMA maintains an opt-out list and we recycle anything else that shows up unwanted. Some people even pay for services where all mail is sent to a processing location, sorted, and only useful pieces (e.g. personal correspondence, bills) are sent to the client's home.
• Via phone. Since passage of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, telemarketing has been dying, accelerated by creation of the National Do Not Call Registry. Even without those protections, most of us will look first at an incoming call's ID before making a decision on whether to answer or letting it ring through to voicemail.

In all of the channels above, consumers firmly exercise the option to bypass engagement. Email is different.

When a message lands in your inbox, it's gotten past some form of spam filter, thus carrying some level of trust. Commercial email may be easy to ignore, similar to physical junk mail, but for some reason it carries a higher level of annoyance.

• Most blatant spam gets quarantined before you ever see it, but all of us get a message now and then about an "unclaimed inheritance" or request to act as a banking intermediary.
• When you discover you've been added to a newsletter mailing list from someone you exchanged business cards with, it feels like a small violation of trust.
• Even when we've opted in to receive messages, some companies abuse the permission and send emails too frequently.

I'm going to write about email more than once this week and thought I'd start here. Unlike other communication channels, why do we seem to care so deeply about the content in our inbox?

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Comments

[Copydiva]

Thanks for the links Peter. I have a new phone number and forgot about the Do-Not-Call Registry. For me, the most annoying is being added to email lists after giving out a business card - it happens all too often.

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=661535244]

You're quite right about this, Peter (although I'm starting to get overwhelmed by junk mail, too; I need to check out DMAchoice.org pronto!). And I think it ultimately comes down to this: We still haven't learned to properly filter our email inbox.

[Sameder]

I suspect this is largely a generational issue. Those of us who grew up in pre & post email knew email when it was a highly personal one to one communication channel. I remember getting my first telnet account to correspond with a group of high school students from all over Virginia about a research project we were conducting; every email was an exciting occurrence. As email evolved in to a one to many channel those of use who were used to the old paradigm still associate email as a relatively personal communication tool which is why concepts such as trust and relevance are so important to email marketers.

The perception of email changes when you talk to folks in their early to mid twenties (and younger) that have grown up with email as a one to many channel. They think nothing of giving out an email address to marketers because they expect to be solicited en masse. Just look at SXSW party RSVP'ing or even the existence of a tool like OtherInbox as prime examples of this phenomenon.

Interestingly, the generation currently in high school have even less personal attachment to email. Talking to my younger cousins, I was surprised to know that very few of them actually use email. Instead, txting and social messaging have become their preferred method of one to one communications.

While, I don't know what will happen as the digital natives hit the workplace, I suspect that we will see a retooling of email as a one to one channel. I think, however, that it will remain a channel for commercial solicitation as we know it today.

[Peter Kim]

Sam, I agree. What remains to be seen is how long legislation can keep commercial interests out of mobile communications. If lobbyists can change current law and open up mobile numbers to any marketing campaign that can guess a user's number, then we'll certainly see a flight back to email or other channels with proven filters/controls.