Inbox 2.0
A colleague recently sent me this post by New York Times reporter Saul Hansell to the Times' technology blog, Bits, about a new concept called “Inbox 2.0.” Hansell explores the idea that your inbox may no longer be ranked purely by when messages are received, but by the relevance of the sender. Needless to say, this could have a big impact on legitimate commercial email not to mention spam.
In many ways, I like this idea even though this kind of change can feel very threatening. Anything that helps recipients make sense of all their inbound communications is a good thing in the long run. For instance, a message from your boss, your spouse or your project leader might climb right to the top of your inbox, whereas messages offering college degrees (that your spam filter misses) would live down at the bottom. As a consumer, I find the idea somewhat compelling.
The idea faces some definite hurdles. For instance, while I absolutely want to see my e-boarding pass from Delta the moment it comes in, the latest promotion from Delta may not be as urgent. It’s not clear to me how an inbox provider could distinguish between these two extremes. Additionally, older ideas like challenge/response have never been widely adopted, even though they offer a more robust solution to managing the inbox.
Only time will tell whether this is the beginning of a paradigm shift or just another good idea to add to the “never reached critical mass” heap.
Comments
Bill - lots of chatter going on about this right now. A few breadcrumbs at http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/email/
Posted by: Brad Feld | November 20, 2007 8:01 AM
Bill - as we are currently using your product to send updates on our offerings, do you have any suggestions on what we can do to not only make sure our mailing "goes to the top of the list" or are we just stuck in trying to make our updates important and stand out on their own? Thoughts?
Posted by: Jenny | November 26, 2007 10:42 AM
The best way to get to the top of the inbox is to make sure recipients are looking at their email client when your message arrives. Fortunately, Silverpop offers this capability. You can use the per-recipient-send-times feature of your email marketing software to send a single mailing over a 24-hour or one-week period, depending on a time and/or day of the week that each recipient is most likely to see it. For example, Recipient A opened a message at 11:37 a.m. and Recipient B opened the same message at 6:32 p.m. Accordingly, Recipient A’s next message would be sent at 11:37 a.m. and Recipient B’s message would be sent at 6:32 p.m.
In addition to sending messages that arrive at the optimum time for each recipient, be sure you are authenticated. Many major ISPs simply bulk unauthenticated email. Or, if they do let it through, they might display a warning that the sender could not be verified, or is not a trusted sender. So, if you haven't already done so, be sure to get authenticated by all three major protocols: SPF, Sender ID and DomainKeys Identified Mail.
To activate the Silverpop per-recipient-send-times feature, or for assistance with your email authentication needs, just contact your client services representative.
Thanks for your question, Jenny, and for making Silverpop your email service provider.
Posted by: Bill Nussey | December 5, 2007 10:47 AM