Email remains the killer application for businesses and marketers, but how much more powerful would it be if it were integrated with you browser as an e-alert, and what is the history behind it?

A lot of people often associate email or e-mail with the Internet. However, e-mail pre-dates the internet quite considerably. Some believe the first e-mail system was demonstrated by MIT in 1961 running on an IBM 7064 mainframe computer. In commercial terms, the first real e-mail system was synonymous with the ARPANET developed by the US state department of defence as one of the first package switched network where e-mail was considered the killer application for ARPANET.

This was still 1966 but by 1969 academic reports were discussing intersystem e-mail communication and in 1971 Ray Tomlinson introduced the concept of the @ sign as a separator to distinguish computer system. Novell, Wordperfect and Lotus all had e-mail systems that proliferated in the 1980’s well before the Internet became widely utilised by the commercial world and all of these used a variety of proprietary bridges and interfaces to communicate with other systems. The proliferation of open standards in the 1980’s most notably Jon Postel in 1981 for the simple network mail protocol (SMTP) lead the way for e-mail to be the killer application for the Internet.

Email: Not original P2P

E-mail, however was always designed as a peer-to-peer (P2P) messaging system and not a broadcast messaging system and herein lies the fundamental flaw with e-mail when used as  business to business communication channel.

The advent of SPAM

The first SPAM was identified as long ago as May 3rd 1978 and now Radical group believe that there are around 171 billion e-mails sent a day and others estimates that as much as 86%  of this is probably SPAM. Why is this? Well the simple reason is SPAM works and it is big business. ClearPoint in 2005 came up with a simple analysis of the economics of SPAM. So we now have an almost Tolkienesque  battle between good and evil or between the ISP SPAM filters (mainly Barracuda software) and the spammers. Unfortunately the real problem is e-mail itself which was never meant to be used this way.

Nearly all online marketing managers would select broadcast e-mail as their favourite direct response channel for getting customers back to their site. It is far cheaper than pay-per-click, search engine optimisation and affiliate traffic. The golden rule of getting a user to visit your site is the most prominent call to action should be to harvest the individuals e-mail address. But this proposition is getting tougher to do achieve especially for new and obscure sites where the end user does not have any tacit trust associated with an identifiable brand. Will the web site sell on my e-mail address to the spammers who will then regale me with special deals on dodgy pharmaceuticals, free access to porn sites and get rich quick penny stocks on Nasdaq that have ‘boiler house’ written all over them?

Despite broadcast e-mail being every online marketers favourite direct response channel, other problems are being accountable. Nearly everyone uses an e-mail distribution service these days in the hope that they will get 85% delivery rates for their opted in e-mail lists and in the hope that the e-mail distributor knows more than we do and can ‘work the system’.

This service has become a billion dollar business in less than a few years where typical costs can vary from a few hundred pounds a months tens of thousands of pounds a month depending on volume. The reality, based on our anecdotal conversations with clients, is that you are doing well if 70% of your opted in broadcast e-mail gets delivered. Then of the 70% of e-mail that gets delivered only 20% gets opened. The low open rates are probably due to a combination of over zealous junk mail filters in Outlook and the user ignoring the e-mail because they get too much anyway.

Love it, hate it too

So we all love broadcast e-mail but we get frustrated with it too. And what if we really need to get our message across? Can we trust e-mail for this. Well legally e-mail has broadly not been accepted as a legally binding document unlike the FAX in most OECD countries. More importantly the ‘I never got the e-mail’ has become one of the great platonic excuses up there with ‘The cheque is in the post…’ and ‘The dog ate my homework…

The intrinsic unreliability of e-mail and it’s poor traceability make it a business-to-business communication tool when it is essential to get the message to your customer or supplier. For example, one of our customers is a very large ISP. They have contractual SLA’s that state they will give three days notice in advance of a planned outage at a data centre. In one case, when the corporate client did not get the e-mail, they subsequently started legal action.

Is there an alternative to E-mail?

Instant messenger, not really. RSS to imprecise with no traceability. The only e-mail alternative (or as we would say e-mail accelerator) is elertz. Or more particularly mailertz, which allows a business to send a message to it’s customer base using Outlook but not going through an ISP SPAM filter.

The idea of e-alerts is to allow the end user to be in complete control of the communication channel, it is SPAM proof for the end-user. If a publisher abuses the channel the end use can end the subscription and the publisher has no e-mail address or anyway to contact the end-user again. It is also SPAM proof for the publisher, there are no SPAM filters to negotiate so there are delivery rates over 95% and open rates of 98%. Furthermore, it is completely traceable.

Elertz’s ISP, for example, can see exactly when the message is delivered and when it is read. Elertz is the only broadcast messaging system. One message is despatched to one million subscribers all one million subscribers see. Therefore, there is a guaranteed delivery in 30 seconds irrelevant of the number of subscribers. As a solution it is very new; patented in the UK, US and Internationally and it is the only real innovation in Internet communication that has happened since instant messenger. Maybe one day all businesses will use e-alerts as their main electronic business-to-business communication channel and e-mail will be used as it was originally intended just to send messages from one individual to another. That’s my forecast and ambition.

By Steve Morris,
CEO, Elertz
Email: steve.morris@elertz.com
Web: http://www.elertz.com
Skype name: steve_morris_the_real_one