Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now. Email is not a messaging protocol. It’s a todo list. Or rather, my inbox is a todo list, and email is the way things get onto it. But it is a disastrously bad todo list.
- Paul Graham
The rumors of email’s demise have not been greatly exaggerated. Paul Graham is not alone in noting the way we do email is in need of a big overhaul. If you have something to say to friends and family, you already go elsewhere. To Facebook Messenger. To Snapchat. To WhatsApp. Not to email.
On the enterprise side, companies worth billions have been built expressly to cut down on the number of emails people exchange. Ask any Slack user, and they’ll happily tell you they receive fewer emails now than they did 2 years ago.
Looking at these scenarios alone, it’d be easy to conclude that email is dying.
And to be clear: email is dying. We’ve been trained to think about email as a monolith. The basics, the look-and-feel, the organization of email have become inevitable, incontrovertible. But if you really think about it, there are actually MULTIPLE versions of email. The problem is that we just never noticed: we’ve always been taught that an email is an email is an email. And because we’ve been told that every email is the same at heart, we’ve refused to imagine any other possibility. But email isn’t untouchable, and the people telling you it is are either wrong, or lying.
There’s the kind of email that WhatsApp and Snapchat have replaced: close acquaintances with frequent interactions, quite often in a social context. And then there’s the kind of email that Slack has replaced: close acquaintances with regular interactions, quite often in a work context.
If you notice, there’s a common thread between those scenarios. The email those tools replace is communication that happens among people connected in either personal or professional circles who are also in semi-regular contact with one another.
But what happens when the communication is irregular, happens across companies’ boundaries, or is among individuals that don’t really know each other? That’s another kind of email.
And that kind of email is not dying. According to the Radicati Group (a well known technology market research firm, known for its authoritative analysis on email), the use of email in business is still expected to increase through 2019, albeit at a slower pace:
While existing tools (Messenger, WhatsApp, Slack) might work in these cases (and we’re POSITIVE someone will try), we all know how this ends: polluted, bloated products, often as bad as the ones we started with, but also awful in all new ways.
This is the reason the third kind of email, the email we know, and use, still exists today — and will probably continue to exist for many years to come. When communication is sporadic, goes across companies’ boundaries, or is among individuals who are acquaintances instead of Facebook friends, email becomes the first and most frequent point of contact.
And why does this kind of email persist? It’s because, despite what Graham might say, email actually IS a messaging protocol. It is a known quantity, a system multiple email services and clients already understand, and something that already works pretty much across all devices. Your PC has an email client. Your Mac has it. Your Linux computer has it. Your iPhone has it. Your Android…we could go on, but you get the picture.
When you work closely with a set group of people, it’s easy to agree on a tool everyone will use. When contact doesn’t happen on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis, you need a tool that allows all parties to communicate. And that is what we know today as email.
What Graham gets right is that email has become a really bad to-do list. The question is: Why? There are three fundamental reasons why email, in the work context at least, sucks.
Email’s Stubborn LIFO Prioritization
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when email began. It certainly predates the internet. Tom Van Vleck over at Multicians has a good write-up of the history of email.
I remember email back in the day of green terminals. Later came HoTMaiL and then Yahoo (not Yahoo! but Yahoo… as all excitement about that company is gone) and finally Gmail. And don’t forget Outlook, the email client guaranteed to give you enough time to get a cup of coffee and chat with the new coworkers, all before startup has even finished. No matter what client you use, you’ll agree that they all looked like something like this:
For years, email clients have told us that the only way to prioritize emails is based on the time they arrive, giving VIP treatment to the most recent one, not to the one that matters most. However, the email at the top is rarely the one that needs your focus now. This thinking is so backwards that it even inspired books (Inbox Zero and Getting Things Done) which in turn inspired small-workplace movements.
Email as an Island
Email has traditionally been a stand-alone system. Think about it. Outlook? Works by itself — is it tied in any meaningful way to Microsoft Dynamics, or even Office? It is sold with Office, but it doesn’t work with Office. Sounds exactly like something the people who brought you Clippy would do. Think about Apple Mail. Is it tied in any meaningful way to your iCloud, iTunes, or FaceTime accounts? Or Gmail…is it tied in any meaningful way to Google Drive (okay, sure, you can save attachments directly to drive, but what else?). And if you advertise on Adwords -and who doesn’t?- does Gmail work better with Adwords? No.
Microsoft, Apple, and Google are well known for having some of the best email clients out there, AND for having sizable businesses outside of email. And yet…for all of their collective business brain power, they’ve never thought of treating email as anything but a lonely island.
And what has this meant for email? Well, it’s made it a messaging protocol that only gets some of the message. It’s made it a to-do list that just records the entries and not much more. It’s meant that email hasn’t changed, and it means it’s being left behind.
Email fails as a to-do list because it fails to help you prioritize in any meaningful way. A single email can have a lot of backstory, but current email clients can’t tell if that customer complaint matters more than the latest earnings report from your finance team. A human would weigh things: How much is this customer worth to us? Do we have any relationship with her? Is there an ongoing deal? When is this earnings report due? Current email clients can’t possibly prioritize this because email isn’t designed to understand what’s important to you.
Google’s Gmail has tried to solve this — they use machine learning and crowdsourcing to try to guess what emails should be delivered to your inbox and which ones should go to “Promotions”. That works in the consumer context — but what crowd is there to inform the email client whether the customer complaint or the earnings report is more important?
When the only context you have is a “from name” and a subject line, your email client can’t identify which messages are mission critical and which aren’t. When email is siloed from the places and systems in which you actually do things, it doesn’t do much of anything for you.
And that isolation from other systems is key. Your email is detached from the places and systems in which you actually do things day-in and day-out, you end up getting your to-do list in one place only to go somewhere else to do the actual work.
Doesn’t this all seem backwards? In Facebook you can view photos, enjoy videos, chat with friends, and keep up with the news without leaving Facebook . But when it comes to email… you read a message, you process it, you head over to some other app, you do X, and then you return to email. Email forces you to jump back-and-forth between apps -or tabs in the best case- just to perform the most basic task.
When One-Size-Fits-All Doesn't
Perhaps the most important reason email sucks is because it has always been designed to solve the same problem for everyone in the exact same way. Gmail’s solution is to give you the same email interface, whether you are corresponding with your mom, a colleague or with a high-value customer. Those conversations don’t look the same, so why does the UI that holds them?
So, maybe the “an email is an email is an email” types were mistaken. Maybe it is important, vital even, to distinguish the ways our communication differs depending on our audience, and that the email client a finance or HR person might use should look (and behave) differently than email for salespeople or another department.
This insight -that email has been too generic for too long- is the key for making email work for people at work.
Re-Thinking the Perfect Email Client
You’ve seen your share of fancy email clients. But then again, minus a few bells-and-whistles here and there, they all basically look the same, and they all suffer from the same three problems:
- They fail at prioritizing email for their users
- They are an island
- They are created for everyone, and help no one as a result.
Email should be for everyone. But not every email client should. Email for work should be designed specifically for the people who use it, not for general population. Why? Because different people need different things: Ally in Accounting doesn’t need the same context, prioritization and structure as Sally from Sales or Rose from Recruiting.
Imagine an email client built specifically and uniquely for a job function.
The great thing is, we can build email clients that are no longer islands — they connect with the other systems users need, and bring once isolated tools into the picture. Email is still one of the most used business apps — yet, it is the least efficient.
Paul Graham knows it’s desperate for more than a facelift, and we couldn’t agree more. Email is ready for a change: We’ve done it.
And you know what happens when your email starts talking to all your other systems? Your email starts to prioritize your digital to-do list according to what’s actually important to you.
Call us crazy (you wouldn’t be the first!), but we just created the first email client that is built exclusively for salespeople. Not for marketers. Not for finance. Not for developers. It only works for salespeople because it works the way they do. We call it Zoho SalesInbox. Check it out.
Rodrigo
