Yes, I remember that onboarding day in a fast paced company with all those newcomers. Young and motivated talents who were asked to suggest some smart idea to push the revenues up, just for fun. Most of them popped up with social network posts or quick mobile tricks. Everything was very smart and full of enthusiasm. Untill the senior guy there said: "All right, what we really need is the user's email address. How would you achieve it?". At the end it seems that the dear old email address was still a secure mean to guarantee the revenues. And the next months just confirmed how much this company was dependent on the email marketing channel.

The same, some years ago email was sentenced to death. Mobile and social network seemed to take the center of the stage and sweep it off. And even if it's true that email not the principle mean of communication between end users anymore, it seems that the new media haven't reach enaugh power to get rid of this channel completely, at least in the marketing business.

Last studies about Facebook says that the social network is becoming more and more a sort of feeds aggregator. What a pity for Google that left floating the G+ project and event closed it's own feed aggregator, Google Reader. It seems that people use Facebook less and less as a way to communicate between each other. They are mostly bombed with news and coorporate's posts. Probably that's the reason why bulk advertinsing with this platform is very expensive and not always performing unless you have already a very recognizable brand or you invent some new super viral kind of content.

A different case for the mobile. Here the interpersonal communication is probably at its top. But surpringisly it pushed the use of email up, not down. People started reading it with their device not only at their desks but everywhere. Obviously proper mobile channel exploded too, because installing your app into an end user device is a super powerful mean of advertising, but... what a struggle! Here again the last inquiries showed that after the very first flash of enthusiasm, people cooled down their install fever. The result is that our mobile phone keeps only with some very important app. So if you're a newcomer it could be incredibly hard and expensive to walk this way towards success.

Beside all these threads we notice that email clients have started to invest in their development again. At the end of the 2000s the rendering engine was so far from the browsers' that email marketing was too way boring. But now most clients have  implemented fully css reading, emoticons, and even video rendering. I don't want to bee too futuristic but, what if they will finally overcome the security issues and allow the use of javascript and dynamic content in the email? Interesting, insn't it?

So, in the end, despite is lyric tone, this is not a nostalgic post. Not like, oh how wonderful was the life before all these new technologies arised. No, it's goal is to focus on email characteristic as a technology and a strategy, to find that there is still a lot to discover and to develop here. Surely more than what was predicted some years ago.