There’ve been plenty of rumblings over the past few years about the impending demise of our next best friend after the canine; and that’s e-mail of course.  What?  E-mail?  Yes, e-mail!  It fetches every time, follows you wherever you go and barks at you when something new has come in. In fact, some companies are seriously considering killing their e-mail.  Internal e-mail will be phased out inside 18 months at Atos. The 75,000 staff will instead use instant messaging and chat-style collaborative services inspired by social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter.  This death march may have started back in 2010, when a death knell was rung for e-mail by data in comScore’s “2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review” report, which noted a decline in time spent with web-based e-mail among all US internet users under 55. Also, users ages 12 to 17, who have been most likely to drop e-mail in favor of other online communications like social networking, had the steepest decline in usage, down 59%.  

 Perhaps some of this new behavior is attributable to Mobile Instant Messaging (IM) services such as Blackberry Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger, designed to facilitate low-cost, real-time communication.  Additionally, with predictions that Mobile IM users will exceed 1.3 billion worldwide by 2016, doesn’t bode well for e-mail. It’s a development which Mark Zuckerberg sought to capitalize on with Facebook Messages, the social network’s “modern messaging system”, which merges text messages, IM and e-mail into a single interface for 750 million users. “High school kids don’t use e-mail, they use SMS a lot,” the 27-year-old technology pioneer said. “People want lighter-weight things like SMS and IM to message each other.” For users, IM offers the immediacy that an e-mail cannot. However, if those teens are fortunate enough to find jobs, they are likely to still find themselves entwined in e-mail’s spam-bloated, sclerotic grip, as spam still accounts for an estimated 89% of all e-mails. 

 Messages from friends and family are taking up a smaller share of all time spent with e-mail. Facebook has even shared that its users under 20 years old primarily use FB messages instead of e-mail to communicate.  So what are social media users even using e-mails for? Most likely, social media users aren’t using it to communicate messages to others, but are being pushed messages with constant updates and notifications from various brands blasting out marketing content.  Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites still rely on e-mail to keep their members informed of recent activity within their social networks, for password retrieval and resetting, with the end goal of getting them to click-through and continue engagement with their sites.

But where there’s social media, there are brands.  So what are brands doing?  They are finally starting to realize that this impersonal e-mail approach is not the key to successfully engaging consumers, as small to medium-sized businesses are embracing social media in their marketing campaigns – seemingly at the expense of longstanding digital advertising tools such as e-mail marketing and paid search. In fact, social media marketing accounted for nearly 14% percent of all advertising spend amongst SMBs last year, ahead of business directory listings (12.0 percent), and closing in rapidly on paid search (15.1 percent) and even e-mail marketing (17.4 percent).

But why are these social media users still constantly checking e-mail you ask – the answer is mobile access.  Less time during one Internet hour is spent with e-mail and more with social destinations, but with the increase in ownership of smart-phones, social media users have a constant connection to social media apps and e-mail. With that being said, e-mail notifications via mobile devices have increased the likelihood of overall e-mail access. 

 While e-mail is not ideal, it’s almost infinitely handier than the paper-and-ink communications it replaced. The idea of living in a world free of e-mail would lead to complications which have not been addressed by social media channels, such as the inability to embed a Word document directly in a Tweet or Facebook post, to name a few.  And although social media channels provide more entertaining approaches to personal communication, e-mail has not yet forgone its importance in business settings.

So, while e-mail communications will continue to live on for the time being, the activities we perform through e-mail will most likely continue to change significantly.