Damn, you’ve got another mail! Time for an Inbox Revolution?
333.2 billion: the number of emails sent per day in 2022. Is that insane? Well, this figure is expected to increase by 13% by 2025, setting the stage for an all-time high email burnout. Are there any worthwhile solutions to tame our bulging inbox? Here are some thoughts.
A wave of innovations for B2B
Starting with academic use in the 1970's, email became mainstream in 1996 with the launch of Hotmail and Yahoo solutions. Nowadays, our inbox has become the backbone of the internet with 99 percent of users accessing their email at least once a day. For the better… or the worse? To determine this, just take a look at Google queries where searches for “inbox zero” just keep on growing. Looked up 18.1k times in march, that’s almost three times more than two years ago. A recent survey even found that email fatigue could lead 38 percent of workers to quit their job. Thus, it is not surprising that the subject has become a major playground for startups, especially in the B2B sector. The goal? Making the email experience more intuitive, collaborative and/or conversational.
Among the leading examples is Superhuman — $108 million in funding since its launch in 2014! — which is built on the principle of exclusivity, committed to building the fastest email experience ever by cutting down friction, automating workflows, designing keyboard shortcuts, etc. Another trending example is Spike, which has redesigned the user interface to make it look like a chat application with many collaborative features (to-do lists, voice mail, video chats, groups, etc.). Worth mentioning also is Front, which goes one step further by positioning itself as a "communication hub" that brings together all communication channels (email, instant messaging, etc.) on a hyper-collaborative platform. In short, there is no lack of solutions to save time and therefore money for professionals. And yet, no one will disagree with me when I say that tech alone won’t solve all our problems and we need to start being more mindful of our email usage as well.
The complexity of B2C overload
On the B2C side, email fatigue is raging, probably more than on the B2B side, but in a very different way. How so? Well, for a starters, you don’t spend all day connected to your personal inbox like you would for your work email, so it’s harder to reach “inbox zero.” (And yet, is inbox zero a worthy pursuit? I have my doubts). On top of that, you get all sorts of promotional retail emails you don’t commonly get on your work email. The other aspect to point out is that there are fewer companies tackling the issue of B2C email overload, and there may be several reasons behind that. First, the market is still largely dominated by behemoths such as Google and the iconic Gmail, which can frighten young players. Besides, and quite logically, on the B2C side, getting individuals as opposed to companies to pay for this type of service is much more complex.
And yet, there are some outsiders looking to reinvent the wheel. Both an email client and a hosting service, Hey, from Basecamp, was launched two years ago with the main objective of fighting email overload. Its particularity? It offers a powerful filtering system thanks to The Screener, a sorting room that allows you to validate each new user. And for confirmed senders, it offers a categorization according to three folders: the Imbox for important messages, The Feed for newsletters and promotional emails and finally, Paper Trail for invoices and receipts. Revolutionary? At first, yes. But will the hype transfer? In June 2020, the month of its release, the query "hey email" was typed into Google 110K times… dropping down to an average of 5.5K monthly queries in 2022. it is clear that the service no longer generates the excitement of its beginnings. What if the solution to the problem was elsewhere?
Time for a reset
I spoke with Cyril Dzou Ottou, founder of the French startup Paplar, who goes a step further in his reflection by focusing on transactional emails, noting that the use of our emails today has little to do with that of yesterday due to the diversification of communication channels via SMS, Whatsapp, Signal, Telegram, Messenger or even via the instant messaging on various social platforms.
As a result, the founder of the startup, which was incubated at Station F, believes that B2C email has become a kind of identifier to connect to online platforms, track orders, receive dematerialized receipts, newsletters and other promotions. The problem? Because email was not designed for this purpose, it often results in a bad experience due to information and communication overload (conversations, registrations, order confirmations and follow-ups, subscriptions, newsletters, promotions, etc.).
It’s a phenomenon that is expected to grow, especially in France, with the end of the paper sales receipt scheduled for January 1, 2023. The decision, taken for environmental reasons, does not seem to have anticipated the considerable growth in the number of emails received as a result, which will inevitably lead to an explosion of digital pollution and unnecessary storage.
Paplar and the future of email?
This observation led to the creation of Paplar, an app to process transactional emails that "acts as your personal assistant," to quote Cyril Dzou Ottou. It provides you with a hub to control the brands you visit; promotional emails become ephemeral "stories" that end up being deleted automatically, which allows you to lighten your email and thus reduce its impact on the environment. The purchase follow-ups have their own simplified and spam-free interface, while the orders are grouped together.
It’s an atypical and surprising vision that is still in its infancy. Indeed, Cyril Dzou Ottou, projects himself even further: "According to me, in 10 years, email as we know it will no longer exist, the alias could be replaced by an unfalsifiable digital identity (NFT) to limit fraud and other identity theft for example. Emails would no longer be plain text in a standard format, but rather simplified and standardized notifications, with QR codes to be scanned or even responses in the form of call-to-actions. A kind of intelligent mail in short, more visual which adapts to what we receive. A real daily personal assistant, and not a digital mailbox where we would like to be able to stick the famous ‘stop ad’ stickers from our traditional mailboxes.”
The answer to our problems or just wishful thinking? Anyhow, we need to move fast and implement sustainable solutions — before we end up drowning in our inbox.
Marie