All-in-Email
The Challenger ESP (CESP) has all the ingredients to create the next generation of Email – let’s call it All-in-Email. Every action imagined by the marketer can be completed inside the email. From search to shop, pay to play, form fills to feedback, browse to bookings, chat to cart management, surveys to spin-the-wheel – everything can now be done inside emails. For brands, this is the solution to AdWaste by solving the twin problems of attention recession and data poverty, and creating a 2-way hotline with consumers. While AMP itself can be offered by any ESP, the CESP can create a monopoly and moat with the other elements: Atomic Rewards, AI, Progency, Prime, QuizMails and Micronbox. Let’s take this step-by-step.
The unlock to this new world comes with QuizMails. It ensures that consumers get experience interactive and incentivised emails. By making it as both a “brain break” and a “brain booster”, the CESP can also ensure that the inbox is opened multiple times daily. This brings attention back to the email inbox from other inboxes like SMS, push notifications and WhatsApp. Once the inbox is opened more, the probability of consumers interacting with more brand emails goes up – especially if there is Mu in the Subject serving as an attractor. And once these emails are opened, there is the next big surprise: no old-style image heavy emails with the clickthrough to a landing page as the only action, but instead an app-like experience inside the email. A search bar can be a standard in all emails; abandoned cart emails can now have payment options inside the email; transaction confirmation mails can have NPS ratings with a single click. The email footer can have AMPlets to collect preferences (“zero-party data”) and gamelets to redeem Mu with 6-second games. Thus the email becomes an exciting communication from the brand, bringing in surprises and fun, besides saving time. Over time, the same experience can be provided with the second consumer unlock – the Micronbox, which could ensure AMP support for even B2B emails.
The CESP will need to go beyond just email sending and delivery, and become an active partner in the reinvention of the email channel. Using Generative AI can ease the marketer’s friction. Progency can help with creating the AMP emails with utilities like an AMP Editor and AMPifier which converts HTML emails to AMP emails in an instant; Prime can bring in the Mu to reward the brand’s users and also help expand dominance to other messaging channels. This entire ecosystem of solutions will be hard for incumbents to match. Network effects for Mu should kick in for both brands and consumers.
All-in-Email thus can become the way the incumbents in the ESP business can be disrupted and the entire value equation can be reset. Just as the digital advertising industry moved from CPM to CPC (impressions to clicks), the email industry also needs to move from cost per email to KPI-based pricing. The prize is a dominant share of the $7-8 billion ESP business, which as we shall see, can be made much bigger by focusing on AdWaste.
