Every so often (a rather ambiguous date range, don’t you think?) the demise of email is predicted.
It’s a pain.
It’s a spam-laden nightmare.
It’s archaic and clunky.
It’s possible that you, too, see email through this lens. But I’m going to hazard a guess and say that, regardless, email is still an essential part of your business and of your life.
In fact, I’ll go a step further: Without email, your overall communication plan (business or personal) would be irrevocably stunted. This is nothing to be ashamed of (though it seems many are). Without the keyless entry on my car, I’d drop a lot more groceries. I don’t think this makes me a bad person.
The latest fad in the “email is dead” game is to claim that social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace will replace traditional email. Status updates, it is said, will suffice for passing along the critical information that travels through email. Check out this BBC article to prove it.
If this appears to be a sleek, trendy, agile solution to the headaches associated with email, well, it’s a bit premature. There is a long list of interesting and useful business applications possible with social networks. Conveying developed pieces of information necessary both internally and externally as part of the business process is not one of them.
That’s still the job of email.
- Email is a place where you get more than 140 characters to decode your message (unlike Twitter, for instance).
- Traditional email (as opposed to Facebook messages, for instance) is a credible, go-to business communication channel. It’s still a vehicle for CEOs to reach out to one another and for customer service reps to personally engage your customers.
- With 210 billion messages sent every day (a large percentage spam, I know), email is a part of our communication fabric, tied undeniably to much of what we do.
Want to make email even more useful? Check out some tips and tricks by clicking here.
Jason Gallic
Product Marketing Manager
