Loading ...Yahoo Mail is one of the biggest and most trusted emailing platforms on the Web. According to comScore, it has 325 million users and is continuing to grow. To find out more about Yahoo Mail and, specifically, what they are doing to leverage the evolving Web, WebProNews caught up with Mark Risher of Yahoo Mail to learn more about these areas.
Risher starts out by saying, “Email is and remains [to be] the killer app for the Web.” As he explains, everyone uses email and need it since it is a prerequisite for many new services now offered on the Web, such as social networks.
Yahoo is trying to enhance the communication aspects of email in order to make it a definitive destination for users that promotes direct messaging. One of the recent ways the Sunnyvale-based company is doing this is through a Facebook Contacts Import feature. It allows users to pull all their Facebook friends/contacts into their email. Risher says the company has been working on social services for some time and that this is just the beginning of what’s to come.
As email continues to get so many social features, WPN asked Risher if email would eventually turn into a social network. Risher says a social network works well when users want to broadcast something out. Email, on the other hand, is more controlled, trusted, and direct. While Yahoo will continue to add social features to email when they are appropriate, Risher says it will not replace email with a social network.
In regards to spam, Yahoo’s mission is “for all users to receive all the mail that they want and none that they don’t.” Yahoo blocks over 1 trillion spam messages each year and in 2009, reduced spam that reaches people by 35 percent.
Recently, Yahoo Mail has added many new features that allow users to send money via PayPal from their inbox, schedule evites, and organize their messages into categories. Risher says users could expect similar features in the future.
It is great to see Yahoo and others investing in email technology. All to often people write off email as old technology (and it is). However, they fail to realize the penetration and ubiquity it has among the average internet user and what that means to marketers.
We recently conducted a benchmark study of millions of emails we have sent for clients. It is available at the post below and may be helpful to anyone utilizing the email channel.
http://priorityresults.com/blog/prioritys-email-marketing-benchmark-study-digs-deep/
80% or more of my communication is thru e-mail. I have however avoided the social media sites like facebook and twitter, bad news. Recently a friend sent me an invite to facebook and it hijacked all the addresses from my local computer to give it a list of “other people I may know on facebook”. Having never been on facebook this is the only way it could have gotten the addresses. I think this is not an isolated incident. One of my clients had his site hosted on Yahoo and they hijacked his address book and sent spam to all of his contacts from his email address. Keeping your addresses information safe is vital and I don’t think the industry is doing enough to safeguard this information.
i too believe email is the killer app for the WWW and as delivery methods evolve there will be new opportunities for those positioned correctly.
In Box Deliverability is what its all about…
Email is certainly important to social media. Google used my gmail account to announce Buzz and I routinely get facebook messages to my email account too. Here’s a blog post about the trend I’ve been watching:
http://priorityresults.com/blog/whats-all-the-buzz-about-the-inbox/