Chances are, your business’ primary mode of internal communication is email. And you’re using instant messaging (IM) apps for virtual meetups and updates from the team, thanks to the coronavirus. Don’t get me wrong, email is great and all for internal communication (if you lived in the 20th century that is). But did you know your email to your teammates gets lost in a sea of unimportant emails? And irrelevant emails account for about 62% of the total emails in an average inbox!
You might’ve noticed this in your inbox. And you know how it feels too, don’t you? It’s time you did something about this.
If you’re a digital business owner looking to make communication faster and more versatile for your employees, get rid of email. Switch to an instant messaging app. Because email, as you know it, has become obsolete. Here’s why.
1. Emails are slow and tedious.
Think about it. In this fast-paced world, email, which lacks real-time communication like instant messaging apps, has no place. Every time you send out an email in a lackluster standard format that lacks emotion, it is subject to misinterpretation by your employees. This leads to a series of clarification emails with the previous email quoted on each email. Whew, sounds exhausting just reading about it, right?
Enter instant messaging apps. Instant messaging apps enable you to interact with an employee in real-time, with you getting instant replies. Apps like Slack also provide inline replies so that your chatbox remains clutter-free. You can even tag a specific person in the chat with an “@” symbol, and they’ll be notified about the tag which they can use to locate your message for them. Life is so much simpler with instant messaging apps.
2. There are more secure ways to communicate than emails
We all know that incoming spam emails always get placed under the “Spam” folder instead of your primary inbox. But here’s where it gets tricky: not all emails under your “Spam” folder are spam emails. You might’ve noticed this yourself.
There may be several reasons why this might sometimes be the case for you, but this cannot justify the damage done. Because you might lose out on important emails from your employees or clients altogether just because it was deemed spam. To add more fuel to the fire, your spam folder might be an obnoxious bunker full of viruses, phishing links, and emails from the Nigerian prince. Even if you don’t do anything, emails, by nature, aren’t secure and are open to any kind of attack, putting crucial business information at risk. So, what can you do?
You can ditch email and switch to an instant messaging app that incorporates end-to-end encryption (E2EE). E2EE encrypts messages and files that you share, protecting them from your competitors.
Instant messaging apps like Microsoft Teams also lets you set up channels to ensure your messages are delivered to the right team. So why bother with email?
3. Emails lack structure
To be honest, there’s nothing much you can do with email other than sending out emails that sound robotic. But with instant messaging apps, it’s a whole new world.
Using instant messaging apps like Zoho Cliq, you can text, voice call or video call your employees all in one place. You can also share your screen for presentations, and you can even communicate with different teams at the same time for handling a crisis. Apps like Zoho Cliq offer a structured workflow for preventing silos among teams. Talk about transparency.
4. Integrating all existing business apps is nearly impossible with emails
When it comes to integrating your existing business apps, instant messaging apps perform better than emails. Sure, emails have add-ons, but they don’t seem to offer the seamless user experience that instant messaging apps offer. For instance, you can pin documents on an instant messaging apps’ channel so that employees can easily access it for reference.
You can even add bots to a channel that takes care of employees’ various needs in real-time, 24x7. If it can’t handle an employee’s request, the chatbot can connect the employee to an internal help desk agent who solves the employees’ issue. This leads to an increase in employee and help desk agent productivity and gets you the best ROI on your workplace support.
All being said, according to Sid Suri, CMO of Manychat, email is now the channel of last resort for inter-office communication and in our personal lives:
"Email will continue to be a primary channel to communicate with somebody whose phone number you don't have, but it will continue to get chipped away by LinkedIn Messaging, or messaging inside of dating apps, and other such niche apps that will take over email's role for different use cases and replace it with more messaging-based solutions. While email will not be the primary channel, it is useful to have a channel of last resort that everybody is passively on—kind of like your postal address. Email is the new snail mail in many ways.”
To sum it all up, email is hurting our productivity and our well-being. On average, it will take you 64 seconds to return to work after checking your email. That equals hours of lost productivity per day.
Not only does email make you less productive, but it also increases your stress level. Researchers at the University of California at Irving found that email was a significant source of stress.
In response to this research and their own observations, some CEOs have decided to ban email. Then what are you waiting for? Don’t get left out following email to the end.
If you’re wondering what alternatives will help you get over your breakup with email, check this out.