Sometime back the COO of Facebook had blurted out some unfortunate things about email marketing – that emails are going away and that marketers will have to focus on teenagers of today to finalize the marketing strategies of tomorrow, and so on and so forth.
Food for thought
Emails are timeless, dependable, unsung moneymakers that have invariably found continued success and more customers for almost 50 years now. And still, there’s no stopping it.
In fact, researches by Radicati Group[1] found out that there were 3.9 million email users in 2019, and the market is expected to grow over to 4.3 million by the end of 2023.
This means, over half of the world population has been using emails in 2019 and the medium happens to generate more ROI than what meets the eye – $44 per dollar spent
Underlining the strength of emails, yet another research by Drift and Survey Monkey[2] revealed that 65% of respondents in the past 12 months have communicated with organizations via emails, ranking it way above the rest.
Being around for so long, this phenomenon in economics is known as the Lindy effect.
The Lindy effect
Author Nassim Taleb in his popular book ‘Antifragile’ speaks about the Lindy Effect. According to him, the life expectancy of a business or an idea is in proportion to its current age.
Taleb states, “If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. And, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years. Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy.”
Now, emails have already been around for 50 years, and so we could expect to see it around in 2070 as