by Rok Hrastnik, MarketingStudies.net editor-in-chief

A good friend of mine, John Botscharow, has recently renounced e-mail as the best online e-zine delivery medium and fully switched to RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds to deliver his R-Market-Daily newsletter.

Evidently he believes that e-mail is more or less dead ... and should be replaced with "the future" (that being RSS for now).

It seems quite a number of other e-zine publishers are starting to believe the same, moving their newsletters to RSS either in full or at least offering RSS as an option.

Is e-mail really running its final lap as the preferred e-marketing tool?

Will RSS (or one of its future versions) really replace it?

And, is there really a future without e-mail (at all)?

John argues the case again e-mail, predicting other technologies will take its place:

"I'm talking now not only about RSS feeds for newsletters and advertising, but want to expand the discussion to include instant messaging, online conferencing in all its manifestations, and the various types of multi-media streaming already available and the technologies that might appear in the not-too-distant future. No, I don't intend to make any predictions on what's coming. I'll leave that to your imagination.

What I am getting at here is that all of these will directly affect the email marketing sector of the Internet economy and how we all do business. All of these technologies - the ones already in place - make email all but unnecessary. Imagine that! An Internet without email. That really boggles the mind, but it is a quite likely possibility."

I agree that e-mail has some huge problems and issues (with spam and delivery problems at the front), but I find it difficult to believe that we will soon have a solution that will widely replace it --- neither in marketing nor in general communications.

Most people are having a hard time accepting new technology. Computers and the Internet were hard on them, new communication tools, such as e-mail, were even harder. But we have come to a point where e-mail has become widely accepted as the de-facto communicational tool for business and personal use.

The vast majority of people have gradually accustomed themselves to its use --- it has now become a part of their lives. And no matter what its problems, it is difficult to imagine that such a huge number of people would switch their preferred communications technology.

Not because they love it so much, but because it's the easiest to stick with. Solutions like RSS, although in place for over a decade now, require new software and new skills ... something that would come as a shock to those that spent a few years getting accustomed to e-mail alone.

e-Publishers may flock to RSS or some other delivery tool, but until the users start following them in large enough numbers, the publishers will still have to stick with the standard, which is e-mail.

The problem of e-mail might seem quite simple from the publishers' point of view: if the technology isn't (or is it?) working, we'll simply replace it with something different.

Well, in the real world replacing the delivery technology also means changing consumer behavior, something not easily done.

In my humble opinion, e-mail is far from being dead and still very far from being replaced with any new technologies. But of course, I just might be wrong. There is much more to this whole problematic than what I talked about in this short article.

Let's call this the start of a debate. I invite all e-publishers and internet users alike to send me their comments. All will be published, and all will be responded to.

In the next part of the series I'll take a closer look at some of the problems (and advantages) of e-mail, and compare them to RSS ... unless someone jumps in and stirs the debate.

E-mail me at rok@marketingstudies.net and we'll see ...