Facebook email branded ‘a flop’

Facebook email, launched 12 months ago amid dire warnings that it would render obsolete millions of email marketing addresses and even kill-off Gmail, has been branded a flop after being shunned by users.
An @facebook.com address is available to the 600 million users as part of the FB Messages service, which features a ‘social inbox’ linking chats, texts, and email.
But Emailvision analysis shows that Facebook email addresses account for fewer than 0.0015% of all permission emails – equivalent to just 1,300 per million – and a far cry from the prediction that half of online consumers would switch to an @facebook.com address.
Tim Watson, UK operations director at Emailvision, cites the poor user experience as the main reason for the ‘flop’. He explains: “The tools to read, review, sort, filter, organise and follow up on email are non-existent. Even the default view for reading email is not great, formatting is removed from text and images are stripped.
“Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail and the less known email clients are streets ahead of the Facebook email experience. Even the message capability in LinkedIn is better than that of Facebook. I might go as far as to say even Lotus Notes can do email better.”
Watson believes that with the major email clients developing rapidly and connecting to social networks, the number of @facebook.com email addresses is unlikely to increase in the near future.
He added: “At the time of the Facebook email announcement there was concern among the marketing community about the potential impact on email marketing.
“In fact, the bigger threat to brand emails has come from the major inbox providers introducing intelligent inbox features, which automatically sort and filter emails to reflect what is most likely to be important to the reader rather than emails being listed in the traditional chronological view. The move to intelligent inboxes is driving a need for email marketers to ensure their communications are relevant.”

2 Trackbacks & Pingbacks