I have spent a number of hours over the past few weeks, bringing air and light to the far recesses of my son’s bedroom and removing a winter’s supply of mud, bugs, dust and pollen from my screen porch.  So that makes it time for my second annual post about spring cleaning your technology.

The Current Clean Up List

To get us started I’ll refer you to my previous posts on the topic – every year you should look at your website to see if needs to be refreshed (and it probably does!).  There are more great tips for cleaning up your website in this post from Moreover Technologies. You should also clean out your old emails or at least archive them out of your mailbox.  Finally, I’ll add here my continued plea to put your fax machine of its misery.

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by  cambodia4kidsorg

I’m going to show my age here because I remember the work world before email.  Yes indeed, business communication was via snail mail, interoffice mail or the good old telephone. It wasn’t until the late 80s that email became so ubiquitous.   I think email and its importance kind of snuck up on me and went from “hmm, how are we going to use this” to “how can we live without it?” in a blink of an eye.  Today, can you imagine not checking your email a gazillion times a day, using your mailboxes as a data repository or missing out on the latest special at your favorite restaurant?  I can’t.

The Future of Email

Yet this morning I read a recent blog post on Hubspot that really got me thinking.  It had lots of statistics about a variety of things but one stuck out to me - web-based email usage dropped 59% among 12-17 year-olds.  My eleven year-old son is just starting to use email – does it mean he’ll quit before he really gets going?  Here is another statistic from the article – 91% of people have unsubscribed from email lists they formerly subscribed to.

What Does it Mean?

What does this mean to your business?  Your current customers are becoming more fastidious about the email they accept.  It is critical that you provide valuable and interesting content to keep their subscriptions.  And that you avoid scammy content at all costs.  At the same time  your future customers  aren’t on email at all  - they are texting, using IM or are on Facebook.  What is your business doing to reach customers in these areas?  Are you ready for the email-less generation?

I would be interested in your thoughts on the future of email and how your business is moving beyond it today.  There are some other interesting stats in this article, let’s save discussion them for another time, shall we?