Email over? Never.
Sure, we’re all finding lots of other ways to communicate. In-app messaging, FaceTime and impromptu Zooms are already second nature. Corporate messaging platforms like Slack are easing into email’s space in the enterprise.
According to our friends at The Radicati Group, the number of worldwide email users will top 4.1B in 2021. The truth is, email is immortal. Our relationship with it will simply continue to evolve.
Depending on your age, you may have kicked off your email journey with a dial-up provider. (Much respect to the lifers still rocking @aol addresses!)
And while the likes of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo captured plenty of users these last 15 years, if you got a new email address in the late 90s or during the aughts, chances are it came from your high-speed broadband provider. Synacor knows a thing or two about service provider email given our Zimbra platform powers white-labeled inboxes for millions upon millions of service provider subscribers.
These inboxes represent email lifelines for small businesses. Or consumers who are perfectly happy with their service and don’t feel like switching. People who have years and years of stored messages and don’t want to fuss with transferring them or risk losing them. Users who want to avoid the hassle of alerting everyone they ever messaged that they have a new email! (Or suffer the nagging suspicion that at least a few of those contacts won’t “update their address books” and continue sending messages into the void.)
Yes, broadband provider email very much continues to have its place and purpose in the market. Yet, there’s no end to articles like this one that encourage users to switch from their internet provider’s email to…something better.
These new services are more “modern” they say. They’re “feature-filled!”
Let’s be honest, some broadband provider email services are looking rather tired. And maintaining them can be daunting.
But there’s an upside: We know email makes broadband services more sticky. It promotes frequent portal visits, creating ad-based revenue opportunities. And it serves perfectly as a branded, non-stop engagement tool.
That said, when email is a cost center requiring infrastructure, maintenance and management, the exit door can look appealing. So maybe it’s time to change perspective.
Here are three fundamental changes service providers can make to how they provision email to offer a compelling service with minimal effort:
- Modernize your UI. The linked article above does make one point worth considering. The big email guys do have competitive offerings that feel fresh. If you’re not offering an appealing, modern interface with the latest app integrations, there will be a certain segment of the market that is forever at risk of churning. Consider the hoops users have to jump through when changing email. Nobody wants to go through that process but they will do it in search of a better experience. Modernize now so they don’t have an excuse to look elsewhere.
- Offload hosting and management to someone else. Maintaining infrastructure for a non-core offering can be costly and distracting. Turn your email hosting cost center over to a cloud expert that can streamline management at a set budget that will give more control over the bottom line. Make email someone else’s headache, especially at a time when combating spam, malware and phishing have become a full-time job. In some cases, even customer support specific to this service can be offloaded.
- Think outside the email box. It can be tough keeping up with all the latest features and functionality required to offer a competitive service. With tech advancing so far, so quickly, many telcos and ISPs are suddenly finding themselves in an entirely different market than they may have entered years ago. Yes, email is the top communications app, but as businesses and consumers show an affinity for new ways to communicate, don’t let your feature set start collecting dust, especially as so many users continue to simultaneously WFH and also enter a return-to-work phase. Double down on email with the-future-of-collaboration features like messaging, doc editing and storage, video conferencing and more.
Synacor is talking increasingly with service providers that are ready for a change. Particularly, when it comes to meeting a range of business, network and innovation needs. As ISPs plot a future path for email delivery, there are many paths to choose.
Whether you will continue to host the service, outsource it to a partner or completely migrate to a cloud platform will depend on a range of factors. What’s most important is not standing still at a time when the world around us is changing faster than ever.
