Email Marketing Automation Suffers:
Regardless of your industry, most medium and large companies rely on automation to streamline their email marketing efforts. Microsoft Clutter will surely assist in ensuring your opportunities will not be realized, rather filtered.
Email Open Rates Will Decrease:
Most of our clients these days are mobile friendly, using our smartphones to filter through emails on the fly, leaving the content we are interested in to be opened and researched further on our desktops. With Microsoft Clutter, you may never get the opportunity to even see the emails that could influence your purchases or company direction.
40 of my key emails today went into the clutter file. I receive approximately 400-500 emails per day, meaning nearly 10% were filtered. When I looked at which emails were being filtered, the sources surprised me. As a Hubspot partner, I receive 2 groups of updates regarding reports I've created per day. All but 1 had been placed in the clutter folder.
More importantly, some of our current clients' emails had been filtered. Being I am on the run most of the time from one place to the next, I didn't even realize these emails had been filtered until I got to my laptop, as the clutter file isn't available on my iPhone 6 on the home screen. One of our clients needed a file pretty quickly, and I never got the email.
Secondly, our clients get in the habit of realizing all of my emails get answered by close of business every day. If I hadn't checked the clutter file by accident, these clients' questions and needs would have gone unanswered. All because Microsoft knows better than we do as to what we want to see and receive for emails.
Lastly, let's assume this filtering cost Kpahi.com just one single client over the course of a year. What would that mean for our bottom line? The unseen, therefor unanswered email could cost ten's of thousands of dollars.
CONCLUSION:
This will most likely get better with age and updates, however at first glance, Microsoft missed the ball on this one, potentially costing businesses billions of dollars. How did I get to this number? There are 1.6 billion Microsoft Outlook business clients. If Microsoft costs each one of these users merely $1, it adds up to billions for a decision that none of these users had a hand in making.
