• by September 29, 2011

It is hard to go to a OMMA gathering these days and not hear the phrase "email is dead." Everyone says the same thing: "no one is going to use email in the future because my children don't use email." Saying email is dead is rational, understandably, and...dead wrong. Email is here to stay and it is only going to get more, not less, critical to our lives.

First the facts:

People spent more time in email in 2010 than any prior year. The next biggest year was 2009. The next biggest was 2008. And so on. And 2011 will certainly be the biggest year for email ever. We are still on a rising trend.

The best proof of email's continued ascendancy is all the companies profiting from it.

The Email Service Provider space has been by growing 30% per year from the last several years. Companies like ConstantContact, Responsys, ExactTarget and dozens of others are providing the ability to send billions of emails for millions of businesses.

While social media gets all the hype, the combined revenues of all the social media systems pales in comparison to the very boring email.

And look how email has revolutionized industries. Gilt Groupe - any email list for a daily deal - now has a higher valuation than some of the most well-known retail brands. GroupOn has revolutionized services by sending them out to deal-seeking consumers via email. And organizations like MoveOn have galvanized hard-core supporters through the simple use of an email list.

Even traditional emails have massively benefited from email. Companies like the GAP, Buy.com, and others generate a huge amount of their revenue (and a larger amount of profit) from emailing their customers and letting them know about special offers and new products.

The power of email is that it is asynchronous (the recipient can read it whenever they want), it can be personalized to the user (unlike a Twitter post where everyone reads the same message), it is very cheap to send (unlike direct mail), it is very traceable, and it is easy to access for almost every American with a wallet.

Some definitions:

Facebook wall posts aren't email (they are visible to everyone) but Facebook messages are (they are sent to only a small number of people). SMSs are just another form of email and might be easier to respond to for some people. IM is not email because it is meant as a synchronous means of communication.

None of this means email will stay the same. It won't. Email is already getting more social, more filterable, more actionable, and more personalized. We'll see some great strides in email in the coming years and it will continue to evolve and become more important in our lives.

Auren Hoffman is CEO of Rapleaf. While you can reach him via social media (http://twitter.com/auren and https://www.facebook.com/aurenh), you can also send him an email: auren@rapleaf.com