E is for Mail: Still the Killer App

TheUS postal service delivers half a billion letters a day. In the same duration,1.5 billion e-mails are delivered in the US.

Indians may be taking to surfing very quickly, but 8 out of 10 dial-ups to anISP in India are not for surfing or Web access. They’re for e-mail.

E-mail is by far the dominant Internet application. It’s changed the waypeople live and work. In our company, as in many others, a lot of processes havesimply moved to e-mail: sanctions and permissions, planning and discussions,day-to-day workflow. It doesn’t matter where you are, or in which city; e-mailand roaming phones keep you in the workflow. Meetings today are abbreviated orreplaced by "let’s discuss it on mail".

E-mail is big. Anything this big cannot but have revenue, cost and otherbusiness implications. It’s big enough to be the center of attention for virusauthors, who have abandoned traditional viruses for mail Trojans…and"social engineering" where a mail can encourage senders to forward toothers, causing globally participative denial-of-service attacks that bring downnetworks.

E-mail advertising has nearly doubled, from 5% of total online advertisingdollars in 1999. US companies alone will spend nearly $0.5 billion on e-mailadvertising in 2000, according to research agency eMarketer, growing more thanfourfold by 2003. An Indian American’s campaign Website for George Bush Jr gota million e-mails in a couple of days, and he got paid per e-mail (report inthis issue), making permission-based mail one of the few working B2C revenuemodels online. Of course, there’s the dark side of the mail: spam. Every tenthmessage in the average user’s mailbox is unsolicited mail–excluding all thenewsletters, opt-ins and chain mail forwarded by friends.

E-mail is clearly the cheapest form of marketing out there today, a fractionof the cost of telemarketing or direct mail. It’s ideal for retentionmarketing, though with innovative use and opt-ins, it can be a powerfulacquisition tool too–as long as you steer clear of spamming. Our Internetsubsidiary CIOL.COM, for instance, has a 110,000 strong opt-in list ofnewsletter subscribers, a power database of IT users.

There were 570 million e-mail boxes worldwide last year, an 84% growth. Atthe same growth rate, we’d be crossing a billion this year. Of course, theaverage user has two to three accounts. But that still means nearly 0.5 billione-mail users worldwide.

That makes for a very powerful market indeed. IDC projects the globalInternet economy at almost $4.5 trillion in 2004. E-mail is going to continue tobe the most powerful tool and entry route into this economy.