Email as a Mobile Engagement Strategy?

I have found this great app for my iPhone.

It’s a great newsreader, it pushes essential blog posts so I can catch up even when disconnected, it connects me to Twitter and Facebook, I can collaborate with my colleagues, I can submit blog posts, jot down notes that get stored in the cloud and can be retrieved from any machine.

It’s available on every type of smartphone, it’s not $2.99, not even $1, it’s free.

Everyone has it, across all platforms, no download required, it works.

It is, of course, email and it sounds to me like the killer app.

This revelation has come to me as two things have happened;

Firstly – I have taken to spending commuting time on the train and secondly I have also started to get overwhelmed by my RSS feeds and found email subscriptions a great way to filter the essential stuff from the must reads. This second revelation, email as a filter came as I subscribed to Robert Rose’s blog by email almost by accident when I left a comment.

I had previously thought of email as staid and old web, surely there is a cooler way to read feeds and I would use that – but I have found subscribing to blogs by email really useful. I had thought about what I needed from cool newsreader app, it needed to be push so that I could read off-line, it would push across devices and have the ability to read it adapted to the screen size.

Email: check, check and check.

Yes it’s old school, I said “cool newsreader” app – but it works. If you don’t want your feeds bunging up your corporate email, then create a new free address. It’s ridiculously simple and I can hear you giggling at my circa 1995 revelation.

My point; it’s safe to conclude that I want content by email.

Yet, email marketing seems to be losing its place when marketers look for ways to engage, social and mobile are the cool kids on the block.

Who in the bar called social media would want to be standing in the “CHOOSE E-Mail” T-Shirt while Twitter over there is getting all the girls and is driving them home in his tablet?

We think of email as a ridiculously large pile of stuff, that our time poor audience has no capacity to consume.

We think of junk and spam (who are now starting to infest the cool kids too).

Its a buzz killer.

But wait – isn’t email social and (gasp) mobile?

Anyone who is even anticipating a free moment of boredom reaches for their shiny little portal to being anywhere else but here.

Yes, maybe angry birds has been a huge success in filling this void, but look around a hotel bar full of business travellers or the bored folks waiting for a plane to take off. Email is the distraction of choice.

And don’t tell me that everyone has that oh-so-urgent business e-mail that must be read and responded to NOW – no, when better time to peruse a relevant vendor newsletter or some mildly engaging content marketing than sitting in a train, on a flight, waiting for a friend in a bar or any of those free moments when we used to day dream or talk to a stranger.

Some folks may be horrified “no more email” they cry and that’s cool. Engaging over the web is about being relevant and that means the communication channel your audience prefer as well as the content you push.

This is personal – this is what I do, I read Robert Rose and I compose blog posts when I travel by train and I read your marketing newsletter when waiting for friends in bars.

Using my new killer iPhone App.

Email.

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Ian Truscott

I’m a 3xCMO, now a marketing strategy advisor and podcast host at Rockstar CMO. Although, I’m not a rock star, but a marketing leader, strategist, content marketer, columnist, speaker, industry watcher, and creator of ART (Awareness, Revenue, and Trust) for the companies I work with. But most of all, I am an enthusiastic tea drinker.

You can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, or now Threads! – or listen to my weekly podcast at Rockstarcmo.com

The half-baked thoughts shared on this blog may not reflect those of my employer or clients, and if the topic of this article is interesting or you just want to say hello please get in touch.