Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Dhatt, CTO of Borderfree (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: It’s still a whole lot of cans right now because the delivery rates are going down. The spam volumes are going up. The inbox is becoming a total nightmare.

Brian Dhatt: It depends on your approach. I think there are emails that consumers value and still want to look at every single day. I think it depends a lot on if you’re pushing personalized and relevant content to the consumer. If so, they’re going to open up your email. I do agree with you. There are many folks out there that still take the approach of sending daily emails. It’s got this generic marketing message or generic merchandising. As a consumer, if you think you’re going to see things that are pertinent to you, you’re going to open that mail everyday.

Sramana Mitra: Honestly, it’s really not viable for people to keep on top of emails anymore given the level of spam. I just look at my inbox and the number of people who are adding me to their mailing list and I have to sit there and unsubscribe from the mailing list all the time. That is an uncontrollable volume of trash that comes over. This is true about everybody these days. That is really taking away from the effectiveness of email marketing.

Brian Dhatt: I do hear you. I feel the same pain. I do like what Gmail has been doing in order to separate out promotional mails from everything else.

Sramana Mitra: I think Gmail does a bad job by actually hampering the delivery of useful, valuable, important emails in that effort to separate junk.

Brian Dhatt: It’s a tough one. That could be one of those areas where somebody out there needs to find a bit better solutions for that.

Sramana Mitra: You’re absolutely right. For e-commerce, email marketing is a very important way of marketing but its effectiveness is really becoming a problem nowadays.

Brian Dhatt: We see this with a lot of startups that we work with. Whether e-commerce or otherwise, everything is shifting towards a global focus. We think it’s important that language and localization are supported in every single platform. If I were to look from a trend perspective, I’m often surprised these days how many products are built without the idea that you could use native character sets for content. I think it is important to notice folks who are building new products to think about that from the start. People all over the world will be using and consuming the product. It will go a long way towards preventing a big effort later to try to do retro-fit localization into a platform.

Sramana Mitra: It was a very interesting discussion. Thank you.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Dhatt, CTO of Borderfree
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