Key Sentence:
- This email obituary is according to Indian entrepreneur Akibur Rahman. Greatly exaggerated.
Today’s announcement by two of the leading investors in the tech sector for a $2 million round of their annual startup Mailmodo kind of suggests they’re okay with that.
Rahman’s thesis is that email is not a dying form of communication but needs to be refreshed. Younger people may be increasingly dependent on social media messaging platforms, but the world still sends 300 billion emails every day, and the number is growing. And it’s much easier for businesses to reach customers via email.
“The problem is, email as a technology hasn’t changed much since it became ubiquitous in the 1990s,” Rahman said. “You still have the same static experience as back then – compare that to the transformation we’ve seen with other digital technologies.”
Rahman has marketing experience with startups and fintech companies and is highly frustrated with the low conversion rates that merchants typically face with email campaigns. The problem, he argues, is that when you email a customer – or prospect – they almost always have to leave the message. You usually have to click on a website to reply; this type of friction is killer, which is why the reaction speed is so slow.
Enter Mailmodo, which uses technology introduced by Google in 2016 that has had very little resonance since then. AMP email – short for Accelerated Mobile Pages – allows email senders to embed interactive elements within the message itself. Suddenly you can send messages from claim forms to purchase buttons that will enable recipients to reply while staying in the email instead of going elsewhere.
This has a dramatic effect, Rahman said. “We started experimenting with customer email and AMP last year and found that conversion rates increased by 250% in the first campaign,” he recalls. “It was such a big climb that we wondered if it was luck for beginners, but we managed to repeat that success time and time.