Why Email (Sometimes) Falls Short of Business Communication Needs
January 15 2016
According to Phil Simon, the author of Message Not Received: Why Business Communication is Broken and How to Fix It, overuse of email is one of many communication blunders business owner fall prey to. Many companies today are embarking on email marketing campaigns, when other forms of communication would be preferable. Today we’ll discuss the use and misuse of email and explore some alternatives.
According to Simon, professionals get 100 new emails in their work inboxes each day. People are inundated with emails, and it’s simply not possible to efficiently sift through the relevant information and then respond to it.
In addition, emails fail to convey the subtext that an in-person interaction does. In a study designed to measure people’s ability to communicate nuance in emails, humor and sarcasm were only detectable in 56% of messages. What’s worse is that most of those people thought their message was coming across the way they intended. As you’ll see, there are a variety of communication options out there that could serve your purposes much better.
Email is prone to be misinterpreted. Even if you understand 90% of the emails you read in a given day, if you are receiving 150 emails a day, that equals 15 misunderstood emails. Inboxes are rarely organized spaces. As Simon points out, it is quicker to search the vast reaches of cyberspace via Google than it is to search an inbox with 20,000 messages.
First, Simon will not email more than three times about any given promotion. If the desired response still hasn’t been achieved after three emails, it’s time to witch to a different method. His second rule is that difficult subjects should never be communicated via email. If you’re giving a consumer or business bad news, like a hefty bill or a late payment notification, it’s best to notify them via direct mail.
Depending on what the task, there are many platforms that can help you achieve your goals in an efficient way. Todoist, DropTask, Flow, and HiTask are great tools for task management within the office. Smartsheet, Asana, Basecamp, Yammer, JiveX, Flowdock, HipChat, and Trello are platforms suitable for collaborating and project management. If you’re going for high response rates, direct mail is the way to go. Study after study have shown that intelligently crafted direct mail is read and acted upon far more than email.
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