How relevant is your Email box these days?
By: Eugene Makarenko
Tags: Email Marketing, Content Marketing, Business, Twitter, Blockchain

Can you actually digest all the Email digests sent your way?

As you surf the Web, don’t you feel like the modern ocean of information is becoming harder and harder to navigate with every passing year?

Everyone and their grandmother are pushing you notifications, remarketing ads, and sending you emails on literally every step you take if God forbid, you have shown interest in something.

Great things do require sacrifice, and I just chuckle when I see Grammarly ads all over my web pages. Now don’t get me wrong — I love the app, and not being a native English speaker, it’s a Godsent for me to have an AI buddy policing my grammar. But guys, I am already your loyal annual customer. You can stop the remarketing ads now, it’s okay. Please tell Google.

But what really took the cake for me is the email digest from Twitter I got into my new company mailbox just recently.

Brand new marketing agency making its first baby steps on Twitter, looking who to follow and what to post — everything is so exciting. If you’ve ever touched modern digital marketing, you know how it is.

Lo and behold, not even a day passes, and Twitter lands its first email digest to the baby company’s mailbox, and that one does raise some eyebrows:

“Why are Asian men seen as undesirable? A convo on harmful stereotypes…”

Naturally, the first thing I do is check who the sender is, and it’s actually Twitter, not a dating website. The plot thickens.

Now don’t get me wrong — I have nothing against Asian men. I’ve got many good friends in Asia sporting all sorts of genders: male, female, and even shemale. Live and let live is my policy. God made us different, and by all means, different we are. Otherwise, the place would have just been too boring.

A dating convo is exactly what every fresh digital marketing agency needs—a screenshot of a Gmail message.

But dear Twitter, how actually relevant you think this information is for a newborn company? By default, the fresh company account on Twitter is subscribed to no less than 13 email digests. That’s right, thirteen types of emails are headed your way the moment you create that Twitter account. Here’s hoping the other 12 are more relevant and are easier to digest.

Medium has 12 types of email notifications at the moment of account registration, by the way. And so do other popular places we like to hang out. That’s dozens and hundreds of email messages relentlessly headed into your mailbox if you stay subscribed for everything and anything by just creating an account somewhere these days.

My friend Louis Bellet is the CEO of a global French Blockchain company, and I know for a fact he isn’t reading his emails anymore. It’s just too many. On a fruitful day, his official mailboxes collect over 800 (that’s right, over eight hundred) email digests and messages. When he opens his mailbox, the Gmail just hangs. I’m terrified at the thought of the processing power Google has to burn to process it. Coming to think of it, he might have been the reason for the recent Google 45-min crash. Just casually opened his Gmail box — boom, goodbye world.

Reading the modern mailbox, even with the help of Google’s sorting AI, is no joke.

Let’s assume you like it rough and decide to go through all of them. Reading each of those emails will take 3 minutes of your time on average and will be pretty much the only reachable activity for the next several days. Yes, that is 5 working days and over 40 hours needed to go through 1 day’s worth of the email digest dump at a sportsmanlike pace. We don’t even count answering, as that would take even more time. Sorry folks, no time to work! Got to read those emails.

Reading the major company owner's mailbox is a full-time job now, and my friend promptly hired an assistant lady to do it. Now she is sorting it out day by day, trying to differentiate the modern everyday flow of irrelevance from actually vital information—poor thing, I seriously feel for her.

Even if you bite the bullet and spend a few hours customizing your Email box to sort it out between “Important first” and “Everything else,” I have to ask — what was the point of “everything else”?

Separating digital seeds from the chaff is becoming a major concern these days. Looking at my Grammarly buddy, sometimes having quite clever ideas about the message, I wonder how long it will take until every mailbox in the world is managed by some AI assistant, deciding whether your Email digest or a marketing campaign is worth the Master’s attention.

How are you dealing with the waterfall of irrelevant information these days? Share your thoughts.