Email is part of our daily lives and definitely not a fad that is going away. Carefully managing mailboxes and email habits is on every CEO’s mind as billions of dollars are lost in productivity each year.

A typical information worker who sits at a computer all day turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times, according to one measure by RescueTime, a company that analyzes computer habits. The company, which draws its data from 40,000 people who have tracking software on their computers, found that on average the worker also stops at 40 Web sites over the course of the day.
According to a New York Times article, “The fractured attention comes at a cost. In the United States, more than $650 billion a year in productivity is lost because of unnecessary interruptions, predominately mundane matters,” according to Basex. The firm also reports, “A big chunk of that cost comes from the time it takes people to recover from an interruption and get back to work.”

Now more than ever, putting your marketing eggs into one “viral” basket is not sound advice for business success.

As marketers trying to reach customers virally, we can safely assume that they are already drowning in viral messaging and that their inbox will only continue to get bigger. What we don’t know is if our audience is using technology to its fullest capacity, or drowning in message overload.

Regardless, this puts the burden of effective communications on the shoulders of marketers. Marketing messages must, therefore, at the very least be:

• Fully integrated
• Highly creative
• Genuine
• Valuable to customer

This means that a balance between traditional marketing and viral marketing must be constantly analyzed for consistency, functionality and overall success.

The balance between the old and new is important because one is predictable and the other isn’t. There are people that will tell you that it is possible to create a viral campaign that will be hugely successful, but according to David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Viral Marketing, the vast majority of agencies making such claims, almost always fail. Why? Because viral marketing requires luck, good timing, and can’t be forced.

Hence, the need to maintain a traditional marketing campaign in conjunction with all viral attempts. If you haven’t already, meet with the key decision makers of your company and define your “baseline balance.”

Keep in mind, balance is key, but so is agility! Be prepared to fail, make changes, succeed, make changes, fail, make more changes, succeed…and so on!

Photo provided by: intersectionconsulting