Trends come and go but fashion is always in style. 20 years of emails shows that it is a consistent way of communication, despite a relatively standstill in development. While the world sings their praise for new and sexy messaging services like Slack, gets rid of stationary phones, and transfer customer communication to Facebook chat bots, the B2B world still rely steadily on email. After three days of WebSummit in Lisbon, Portugal, I am even more convinced than before.

Email is still an effective marketing channel.

Nobody likes newsletters that doesn’t contain news neither relevant information. But the stuff in your inbox that makes you stop, look and click is still a golden ticket for the companies that send them. First and foremost because you have asked of them, and also because you can measure everything that happens with the email from the moment you hit the send-button. Email is also the most universal carrier of B2B communications, such as partnership discussions and sales letters.

Email is however taken for granted.

Both sender and receiver believes firmly in that what leaves one end will reach the other. But that is unfortunately not always the case. And service providers should go to greater lengths to assure their customers that they actually can trust the deliverability of their precious emails.

Email is what we do when all else fail.

What happens when you haven’t logged on to your message service in a week? When an event organiser want to make sure that you get the info they already sent out by push notifications? You get an email, because that is the worlds most decentralised form of communication and a universal fall-back. What if it doesn’t work, and even worse, what if you never find out? You can put demands on your email service provider. Whether it is a telco, an ISP, a hosting company or an email marketing platform, you can demand;

• Never delete or quarantine a message silently, always inform the sender if a message isn’t delivered to your inbox.
• Use DMARC so that the sender address can be trusted.
• Use DANE to make sure that email is encrypted.

You have the right to high deliverability and security, and together we are responsible for not holding back the development of email.