The Truth about Emailing

Is emailing truly a dead form of communication for salespeople? With the newest forms of social media and advanced technology, has emailing become a complete waste of time?

The answer is yes, and here’s why.

Inefficient Use of your Time

Every day, salespeople dedicate countless hours to weeding through emails and drafting an endless number of emails to prospects. While this may feel effective, the person receiving the email may not actually open it. A recent study revealed that the average inbox has only 38% relevant, critical emails, leaving over 60% of emails discarded or irrelevant. Spam filters capture a large majority of emails, or people weed out the emails that don’t pertain directly to them.

In a recent study by Adobe, over 1,000 white-collar workers revealed that they spend an average of 4.1 hours on emails per day. That’s a total of 20.5 hours per week and 1,000 hours per year. People are spending less time checking their email, however, salespeople continue to spend ridiculous amounts of time focusing primarily on email marketing.

Rather than continuing with a fading trend, save time and increase your operational efficiency by making the transition that your prospects have begun to make. Look into other communication platforms that are both relevant and engaging.

Growing Competitors

With the advancement of social media and messaging apps comes the reduced demand for emails. People are already looking to instant forms of communication, relative to email.

With an application like Slack, you can create group discussions and various threads and channels to keep information more centralized and relevant. Asana allows you to assign tasks and have discussions, all in one place. Platforms like WhatsApp and Skype are instant, where we can interact with people directly and see when they type and open messages.

The preferred form of daily communication has shifted towards direct messages that people can see and respond to instantly. Emails consume more time, leading to a shift away from tradition and towards new innovative applications.

Impersonalization of Cold Emails

Cold calling and cold emailing are both traditional forms of basic outbound sales. However, both are dying forms of outreach. As salespeople are flooded with an endless amount of tasks, personalizing emails becomes a smaller priority and it’s more about sending an email — even if that entails an impersonalized message to a prospect.

Cold emailing, when done correctly, is personalized to each prospect. This should be detailed with facts or correlations pertaining directly to the prospect; they expect personalization as if you are speaking with them face to face. If your email reads like something you might send to any number of potential clients, your email will end up in the trash. The email personalization should relate directly to why this prospect would benefit from the product you are selling.

While this is not rocket science, it is easier said than done. In order to personalize messages, it’s important to keep notes on your prospects through the base sales pipeline. These notes, in turn, will later help you craft compelling and personalized emails that your prospects will read. With Fireflies.ai, effective note-taking is made easier and you can stay up to date with prospects. A personalized AI assistant bot automatically takes notes from your calls and keeps you updated, so your emails can stay updated. With more accurate and complete notes, you can focus on the quality of your conversations and send emails that won’t end up in the trash.