“Receiving” may not be the right word, but I receive over 100 emails every weekday. Instead, messages from all kinds of hard-working people are clicking into my inbox saying, “I hope this helps.” It constantly interrupts the flow of work that I'm desperately trying to concentrate on. I often think, “Maybe this is important.”
It's rare, but the emails keep coming the same way. The state of my personal Gmail account is sadly even worse.
I'm not a fan of email. It was created in one form or another in his early to late 1970s, depending on who you ask, and symbolically romanticized in Efron's classic production of 1998's Nola. You've got mail. Email was, on the surface, the perfect platform at one point. Anyone with an Internet connection can easily send messages to others. This happens almost instantly, and messages can be easily tracked and archived. Technically, it's difficult to beat this.
But since then, technology has given us more ways to communicate than we know what to do with. We text, Slack, Gchat, tweet, signal, post, DM, shout, and constantly check in across platforms. But somehow, over the last 50 years of technological advancement, email has remained not only relevant, but essential.
How did they avoid occupying the display cases of the Old Technical Museum?
I'd really like to add the entire company to the technology trash heap that comes and goes. It can join my boyfriend's Zune, PalmPilot, hundreds of flash drives lost over time, and my Game Boy. Technology and innovation move relatively quickly. One day he replaces his cassette deck with a CD player, and the next his Spotify app on his phone makes the Zune obsolete. (I loved the Zune. It's worth it.) That sentence would make absolutely no sense for future civilizations, and shouldn't it?
But no, that's not the case with email. It's long past time for it to be phased out, but I don't think my wish will come true. According to a McKinsey & Co report, the average worker spends just under 30% of her workday reading and responding to emails. Additionally, Adobe's 2019 study on email usage found that people spend about 5 hours per day checking work and personal email. This means more than half of our eight-hour workday is lost to this anachronistic technology.
Brian David Johnson, a professor of practice at Arizona State University's School of Social Future Innovation, says that's partly because our culture is set up that way. He suggests that this hostility towards email is probably my own, which may be true. However, I would argue that our culture has changed to the point where email as currently used is no longer useful. For email to once again play the role we intended it to play, it will need to become even smarter, in a way that actually makes our lives easier, rather than becoming a burden. .
Email continues because we specify two modes of communication: work and play.
Like many other disruptions to the professional world, Gen Z seems ready to do away with email, at least in the office. “People who say email is the best of all time are probably of a certain age,” Johnson says.
A 2020 study by consulting firm Creative Strategies found that email was among the top tools used for collaboration by office workers over 30. People under 30 preferred Google Docs, Zoom, and iMessage.
But truly finishing email can be a mountain climb. The reason it's been around for so long is because it's ingrained in the culture we've built around it. Somewhere along the way, the email was specified as: of Probably because it makes more sense than sending letters back and forth to get the job done. Alternatively, as texting became more popular in the late 2000s, it fell into the family and friends camp. We have created unwritten rules governing how we interact with these communication technologies.
Jon Fasoli, chief design and product officer at Mailchimp, explains that one reason email remains important is because the use cases for email are simply broader than those for text messages and phone calls. To do. If you need quick, clear explanations or a personal conversation, use the phone. If you need to meet face-to-face without being in the same room, use Zoom. Email is available if you want a record of the conversation, a link to click, and an overview of all the information you need.
“It’s the culture around technology that can solve problems and aversions,” Johnson tells me. “Email and text messages operate on essentially the same idea, but the difference is the culture surrounding them.”
The way we communicate – our tools and culture – has changed over time, and email no longer works the way we intended. There's no good way to quantify how many “important” emails people actually receive each day, but the number of emails an employee sends is about 40 a day, and half of the 120 he receives. much less. Additionally, according to a Harris Poll survey, an employee tends to burn out when he receives 50 emails. This isn't perfect, but it's safe to assume that people are ignoring the rest of his 70 emails in their inboxes and don't think they're all that important.
My work inbox is full of PR pitches for articles I don't write, newsletters I barely read, and invitations to events I don't want to attend. When his colleagues want to chat, he uses Slack, and the executives and communications professionals I spoke to at a recent cocktail party (which I rarely accepted) say they use it as well. I said there is.
Even our personal inboxes are swamped with spam and thousands of unnecessary marketing promotions and notifications we never read from companies hungry for our money. My site is chock-full of promotions from just about every store I've ever bought something from and every website I've logged into. A marketer just wants a 10% response rate. However, Adobe research shows that only about a quarter of email offers from brands are interesting or compelling enough for customers to open them.
Nora Ephron convinced my teenage self that while people used to send each other heartbreaking, heartfelt, and remarkable emails, only her mother actually received them in her private life. He gave it to me. (I'm not particularly proud of my response rate.)
If email isn't made obsolete, AI could improve it.
Still, “email remains the dominant means of communication for small businesses,” Fasoli says.. “It's a standard, or standards. Very little communication is standard around the world.”
I don't think innovation always comes with death, but if we're going to insist on using technology that was developed 50 years ago, I think it's at least worth agreeing that it's time to upgrade how we use it. can.
Fasoli said Mailchimp, which provides marketing automation and email marketing services to businesses, is working to help personalize the email experience for its customers and their customers.
Personalization doesn't mean slapping someone's name at the beginning of an email with a quick hook. The key, he explains, is to ensure that emails appear in the mailbox at the right time, with the right content and the right services and promotions that customers need.
Society is “at a stage where people are acting on a spray-and-pray model, which means everyone gets all the emails,” he says, pointing to the oversaturation of marketing jargon. . His goal is to reduce the amount of email people receive. Email becomes more personal, engaging, and therefore important. Ideally, you can go from receiving all emails to only receiving emails that are actually important and addressed to you when you need them.
One way to get there is by implementing more AI. Both Fasoli and Johnson believe that email and our relationship with it can be vastly improved. If an email address is in his Mailchimp system, Fasoli says, they know a lot about that email. Add to this the theoretical use of AI, and it could help companies know when to send personalized emails about refurbished Zunes, for example.
From Johnson's perspective, AI can make email work like a personal assistant. You can now reply to specific emails, organize your emails, hide what you don't need, and more or less everything you can do with email. However, the purpose is to reduce the burden on the user. Make email work smart enough for us.
But there are still many situations where email doesn't work well for us. Our communication culture is changing, as evidenced by the innovations being introduced to email that will, hopefully, adjust our relationship to email.
“[Email] There is this idea that it has been around for a very long time and has lost control,” Fasoli says. “The key isn't more email; it's less. It's private, more personal conversations, whether it's between marketers and customers or public relations professionals and journalists.”
“That's where I think the general power of email will remain.”
