Email alive and kicking in era of WhatsApp, FB messenger

If anyone thought that the good old email would soon become obsolete in the era of instant messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook messenger, he would be wrong. Emails have seen their strongest growth in 2016-17 with India being the biggest growth driver in entire Asia, according to a report by marketing technology company Netcore Solutions.

Thanks to the digital initiatives by the government and growth of e-commerce market in the country, the transactional and triggered emails grew by 220 per cent in FY 17 and likely to double in this fiscal.

Kalpit Jain, CEO, Netcore Solutions, told BusinessLine that the social media has not killed this 45-year-old medium of communication but yes it has definitely changed the way it functions today. The P2P (peer to peer) mails have reduced but lately the transactional and triggered emails have witnessed a huge growth buoyed by the transformation in the consumption habits and patterns among all consumers preference to access real time information on multiple platforms and channels simultaneously.

Transactional and triggered mails are type of emails sent to facilitate an agreed-upon transaction between the sender and the recipient. Transactional emails typically contain information a recipient wants or needs and consequently have 8x open rate as compared to traditional promotional emails and have 6x ROI. Common transactional email use cases include, account creation emails, password resets, purchase receipts, account notifications, OTPs, bank transaction details or social media updates.

“These kind of mails have witnessed a massive growth in India last year because of the digital drives undertaken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi whether it be demonetisation, making Aadhaar mandatory or GST. Besides, the penetration of smartphones has also led to a growth in email as the devices are now required to have email address synced. The brands/companies/banks have realised that emails are the most cost effective way of communicating and also that Netcore achieved a new benchmark by sending an average 150 crore transactional emails and 400 crore (promotional emails) per month in the last quarter for their clients across Asia.

“This transformation in the consumption habits and patterns among all consumers is what we broadly terms as the rapidly growing age of ‘consumer parallelism,” Jain said.

Netcore serves more than 300 brands in Asia from across sectors to disseminate transactional/ triggered emails and it has seen a paradigm shift in the way organisations are communicating with their consumers. Earlier organisations in India used their in-house transactional platforms to disseminate information to their customers. But lately due to the surge in the volumes of customer base, demonetisation and GST, organisations are outsourcing their transactional/ triggered emails to experts.

The company currently holds around 50-60 per cent of the organised email solutions market in the country. The company serves marquee clients such as YES Bank, Axis Bank, Religare, India Infoline, Ola Cabs, Vodafone and Shine.com.

“With a surge in the e-commerce portals and platforms and the upcoming festive season, we anticipate the transactional/triggered email volumes to grow further by 100 per cent annually for the next 2-3 years,” Jain said.

Netcore, which is also a leading email solution provider in Asia, said that it handles about 33 per cent of Indonesia traffic, 40 per cent of the Philippines’ traffic, 25 per cent of Malaysia's traffic and 20 per cent of UAE's and has been witnessing a quarter-on-quarter revenue growth of 30 per cent from its transactional/triggered emails solution.