Emails have been going strong for decades, but that might be changing.
How many emails do you get in your work inbox each day (avoid the powerful urge to look at the picture below)? Is the number more than 100? Less than 100? Well, if you receive fewer than 121 emails a day, consider yourself lucky! You’re not up to par. The average American worker receives around 120 emails every day for work, not including spam (insert shocked emoji face here.)
That’s a lot of critical information being passed through the air like magic. When I say “critical” I’m using my sarcastic tone, but you can’t read that. A study found that nearly 1/3 of all emails a person receives are irrelevant to their job or responsibilities or are of such little importance that they go to the trash bin without a second thought (I’m looking at you, chain emails that won’t die). So what’s in store for this archaic dinosaur of a communication medium? You’d be surprised.
Innovation Breeds Innovation…Sometimes
So far, email has escaped the fate of other popular technologies. Things like floppy disks, VHS cassette tapes, and Tamagotchi Pets were very popular in their times, but were ultimately replaced by something better, typically within a few years. Emails, however, have been around since 1971 when Ray Tomlinson sent himself the following email: “something like QWERTYUIOP”.
There’s a digital graveyard somewhere out there with all the Tamagotchi Pets I neglected to feed in my youth, but email has no such similar fate. It’s like selfies. We all hate selfies, but we all participate. There are some people that go the extra mile and invest in selfie sticks and expensive gear to get the best selfie experience. Then there are the overly self-aware people who try to take a selfie while nobody is watching. We all sneer, snicker, and smirk at the confident individual who shamelessly takes a selfie in front of the world’s largest ball of twine. We all wish selfies would go away, but we’re all forced to participate. Just like email.
(R.I.P. all my Tamagotchi Pets from the 90s)
Email has competition, but it’s weak
When we see how Uber killed off the taxi industry or streaming services burned Blockbuster to the ground (I still have my membership juuuuust in case) we’d expect something similar to happen to email when collaboration and instant messaging apps make it on the scene.
There’s Slack for internal office communication. WhatsApp, Google Chat, and Signal for messaging friends. Half a dozen video conferencing platforms we sometimes wish didn’t exist (high five if you take work calls with pajama bottoms on). But the crazy fun fact of the day is that we’re sending more emails today than ever before.
We sent 319 billion emails a day in 2021. That’s 13 billion more emails a day than in 2020. AND, just to show 2021 where it belongs, we’re on track to send 347 billion emails a day in 2022! So what gives? Shouldn’t we be seeing a massive decrease of emails being sent as better technologies come on the market?
Sid Suri, CMO of Manychat, a social media instant messaging app, says email is the last resort of communication in our personal and work lives, but that it’s unlikely to go away completely:
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 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.”
“Last resort that everyone is passively on” is putting it nicely. Across any device, an email you send has less than a 50% chance of even being opened. The highest opening rate happens on smartphones, where 42% of emails are opened. Guess how many emails are opened when someone is using a desktop computer. Do you have a number in mind? It’s 18.2%. As an email snob who prides themselves on a clean inbox with no unread messages, this makes me faint.
Email gets snarky and fights back
Many people believe that taking the time to create an email results in better, more authoritative material than sending an instant message, yet history shows that tools that demand more of our time are often outperformed by simpler and faster alternatives.
Internal communications and interactions amongst coworkers are increasingly centered on quick-fire messaging, themed chat rooms, and private social media feeds, with email reserved for external and more formal relationships, such as suppliers and clients. This implies that email has a built in waiting period to allow the reader to reflect on the information within and compose a thorough response. But that wonderful waiting period, where you can reread and draft the perfect email, comes with a huge cost to productivity.
The average office worker spends 30% of their day reading and responding to emails in their inbox (but remember, less than half of the emails in their inbox will even be opened.) Of the emails they actually do open and read, 30% are irrelevant to them or deemed as unimportant and get deleted. So, new instant messaging tools are replacing the void of watercooler chat and informal interactions between distant employees, while email remains the steadfast professional communication medium of choice. Email isn’t going away…at least for the time being.
It all comes together…
You’re probably wondering why I’m writing this insanely hilarious blog and you’re probably also wondering how you got here when all you did was Google “Things to do at Lake Wallenpaupack when you’re afraid of the water.” All great questions.
Our company IRIS Systems, is an encrypted communication and collaboration platform for local governments and healthcare providers. Think of it as if Linkedin and Slack had a beautiful baby together… and then forced that baby to work for the government and private healthcare in order to make the world a better place.
We recently conducted a closed trial of our software with 18 different government organizations here in Utah. All of these organizations use different email providers and different communication platforms to work with each other.
When these organizations switched to our platform to communicate and collaborate, we saw amazing things happen. The average user:
- Reduced their email inbox by 55%.
- Received responses 15x faster than with email.
- Saved 1.97 hours a day due to increased productivity.
Are we tooting our own horn? Yes. Am I trying to show how email doesn’t have to be the dreaded selfie we’re all stuck with and wish would go away? Absolutely. Am I asking questions I know the answers to just to fill up my word count? You betcha.
But email has a time and place of usefulness. Much like the great Michael Scott describes below. However, if you work in government or healthcare and want to improve your internal and external communication and collaboration across multiple offices and jurisdictions, send us an email (see what I did there?)
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