At the turn of the millennium, email was great. We didn't receive very many emails and we appreciated each and every one we received. Open rates? Through the roof! The senders? People we knew personally—mom, uncle, sister, friend, colleagues, and companies we had well-established relationships with. “You've got mail!” sang AOL, reinforced by the impossibly charming 1998 film starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Remember that? I know it's distant. I know it's got the romanticism in which hindsight's often wrapped. But email was pretty great.

“YOU'VE GOT MAIL”

A romantic connection to email today? Not so much. One estimate has American workers spending one third of their work time in the inbox. That's at least 17 hours every week for the 40% of us with 50-hour workweeks.¹ A survey of 1,500 highly educated Canadian workers found that they spend 11.7 hours at work and 5.3 hours at home on email each week. They receive more than 120 emails per day and about half are regarded as spam.² Which generation spends the most time on email? Millennials, by far, at 6.4 hours per day.³ If you work in a professional capacity, you use email. Often.

Even though we complain of being overwhelmed, nearly half of us report electively checking our work email outside normal work hours and more than half of us check personal email while we're at work. A survey of more than 1,000 white-collar American workers found that 27% of us check work email while having coffee, eating breakfast, or getting ready in the morning. Ahead of them: the 23% who check work email more while still in bed!⁴ In total, we open 77% of work email and 59% of personal email. How do we feel about it all? Though we're occasionally excited by personal email (34%) and work email (17%), we're largely indifferent about both. We could fill an entire chapter with stats like these, but you already know it intuitively. You can't resist the draw of the inbox, even when it seems like too much. Relationship status: “It's complicated.”

Volume's up and relevance is down. Spam makes up 45% of all emails sent and costs businesses an estimated $20.5 billion per year in lost productivity and technical expenses.⁵ Yes, that's the fortune that awaits you via a Nigerian prince or the overseas executor of your long-lost family member's estate. And it's the unsolicited offer for pills, faceless request for connections on referral platforms, and pitch for services for which we've never been in the market. But it's not just the obvious stuff our increasingly smart spam filters snag for us. We spam each other. Ever been trapped in “Reply All” hell on topics unrelated to your role and responsibilities? Or in a seemingly ceaseless back-and-forth with another person that rivals the best Ping-Pong volley of all time and that could have been settled with a five-minute meeting?

Whether you scratch and claw toward Inbox Zero or proudly share screenshots of your 21,347 unread emails, find something that works for you, but don't take a victim's mindset about it. Be intentional and create a healthy relationship with your inbox—because it's not about the inbox, it's about your fellow humans on the sending and receiving ends of those messages.

ALTERNATIVES TO EMAIL

So, what's the answer to our email ambivalence? Automation? It can work, but only in well-defined and highly repetitive processes. We can write rules to manage the inbox, have our email sorted and prioritized for us, and have replies sent on our behalves. Automated email saves senders time and improves productivity. With Conversica, our company sets up triggered sends and sequences to help prospects and customers schedule appointments with our human team members. When specific criteria are met, the sequence starts. When a recipient replies, Conversica can read key words and sentiments and respond accordingly.

Enhancing tools and systems like this one with adaptive automation makes them better with every send through artificial intelligence and machine learning. Bot sends and replies are full of promise and already delivering results, but an inbox that runs itself is not yet available to you and me. Digital pals like Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and Google Assistant can fetch things for you, answer questions, help you shop, take dictation, read to you, and recommend words or phrases for message responses, but they're not quite ready to run your inbox.

How about something like the collaborative messaging app Slack? The promise is made in headlines like “How Slack Is Killing Email,” “Using Slack at Work? Here's How to Reduce Email by 80% or More,” and “Slack app: How this company will kill email and change the way we work.” Yes! Let's kill the beast … by moving all those messages into a new channel that has added and often exaggerated urgency, inflated expectations of immediate reply, increased likelihood of “reply all” irrelevance, and increased attention demand as alerts tally up and fly onto our screens incessantly.

Steve and I use Slack every day; our entire company does. It's an extremely useful tool to communicate with team members, close partners and suppliers, and groups of like-minded people who join themed channels, but it doesn't save time or preserve attention. It offers some great features and functions that our inboxes don't, but the reality is a both/and situation with Slack and email. Or any messaging app and email.

Social networks and social messaging? We've moved many of our conversations there, but not the majority of them. For better and for worse, they're less formal than more traditional communication channels. One key weakness is inconsistency. You're connected to him on Facebook and Twitter. You're connected to her only on LinkedIn. And you're connected to them on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. But those two guys don't respond to LinkedIn messages, even though she does—but only a couple of times a week. Lack of consistency makes it hard to loop in everyone involved in a project, process, or transaction in a single social channel. Social messaging is best on a person-by-person basis after someone's proven a presence in and preference for it.

Texting? 81% of the American population has access. 97% of smartphone users sent a text in the past week. And the open rate is 99%.⁶ Even with automated appointment reminders, it's still an intimate place. Because of this, it's more commonly used in a B2C relationship than in a B2B situation—at least until a close relationship's been built. A sole practitioner or small business owner is more likely to text directly with people than a mid-market or enterprise company's inside sales and customer service reps.

Phone calls? We've aged out of the golden “You've got calls!” era. More than 3 billion robocalls go out every month.⁷ Fraudulent calls grew from 3.7% of mobile phone calls in 2017 to 29.2% in 2018. They're projected to climb to 44.6% of all calls in 2019.⁸ In other words, spam calls to your mobile phone will be equal to or greater than spam emails sent to your inbox! At the same time, spoofing technologies are getting better and better, too, so the fraudulent calls keep getting through. At least the spam filter for your email has decades of experience and machine learning behind it. Unless your number's been added as a known contact, your odds of someone picking up your call are slim.

Video conferencing and video chat? They overcome distance. Any two people with a camera and an internet connection can get face to face from anywhere in the world. It's the next best thing to being there in person. But they don't overcome time, because they're synchronous. You've both got to be available at the same time. And in a professional context, it should be scheduled. You know that back-and-forth:

• “Sorry I didn't make the call at 3 p.m., I got the time zones mixed up.”
• “Are you available on Thursday at 9 a.m. or 11 a.m.?”
• “No, how about next Tuesday afternoon?”

When you send an email or video email, you do it when it works for you. Your recipient may look at it immediately, later that morning, or sometime in the next couple days—when it works for him or her. Asynchronicity adds convenience for both sender and receiver. And tracking closes the loop, so you know when they opened your email and played your video.

So, the answer's not either/or, it's both/and. These alternatives are all part of the fragmentation of communication. When conversations start in the email inbox, they may migrate out to another channel. But email may remain primary, even as you mix in video conferencing, phone calls, or social messaging. In the words of a great email we recently received from Copy Hackers, “In the digital marketing world, email is as close to immortal as it comes.”

THE INDISPENSABLE TOOL

Email remains ubiquitous; it's still the go-to business communication platform. It's withstood tests of time and thrived in the face of threats from all comers. We all use email every day. Many of us use it multiple times or even perpetually throughout the day. We're closing in on 4 billion email users worldwide—more than half the world's population.⁹ Gmail alone claims more than a quarter of those users. Most of us have more than one email address; we average 1.75 addresses per user. And though the growth rate has slowed to 3% a year, that rate of growth on billions produces increases in the tens of millions of people.

For more than a dozen years, email marketing's remained the top digital channel for return on investment. The Direct Marketing Association and Demand Metric recently reported a median ROI of 122% for email—more than four times higher than social media, direct mail, and paid search.¹⁰ Email's ROI is described as “excellent” to “good” by 74% of companies.¹¹ And it's been this way for years. On the consumer side, we still choose email over direct mail, social, texting, and phone calls as the preferred way to hear from brands at 50% (versus 20%, 7%, 7%, and 7%, respectively).¹²

Great, but that's mostly about email marketing and sales prospecting. What about direct email communication? Per HubSpot, 86% of professionals prefer to use email when communicating for business purposes. On the consumer (and youth) side, Adestra found that 68% of teens and 73% of millennials prefer to receive communication from a business through email, 86% use their smartphones for email, and 48% of teens and 44% of millennials do so immediately upon waking up in the morning.¹³ Per that same study, face-to-face communication and email are tied as our most preferred work communication channel (31%), but we use email more often (72% to 61%). We can pile up more and more reference points, but the fact remains that despite fragmentation into other channels and despite it being the method that is longest in use, email's not going anywhere.

For its ease, familiarity, ubiquity, interoperability, targeting, trackability, and other winning characteristics, email remains a killer app. Instead of remaining faceless, however, email can easily be rehumanized in a way that saves you time and improves results—with personal videos.

THE PROBLEM OF (OVER)CRAFTING YOUR EMAILS

When we write emails, we labor over every word we type. And even though we expect we've done a good job making our message clear, we consistently overestimate our communication quality. Now an assistant professor in the Management Department at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, Andrew Brodsky, PhD, was a doctoral candidate at Harvard Business School when he reached out to me about creating a research project. He'd already done several studies related to organizational behavior, work communication, and employee productivity and was curious about traditional email and video email.

From volunteers in the BombBomb customer base, mountains of data were collected about traditional emails, video emails, time spent, emotional effect, message effectiveness, and more. In the abstract of the third chapter of his dissertation, Andrew captured the true pain of traditional emails in this way: “In an experience sampling study, which captured email communication in real time, I find that workers will often engage in over-crafting of email, whereby workers spend extra time crafting messages to the detriment of their productivity, message effectiveness, and well-being.”¹⁴

Many of those hours spent in our inboxes slow us down and wear us out as we work and overwork to organize the words in a way that gets our message through in the way we intend. But the inherent limitations of the medium and the limiting factor of our egos keep us short of the goal line. Effective communication in plain email is limited by the absence of gesture, emphasis, and tone. In the opening of a research piece titled “Egocentrism Over E-Mail: Can We Communicate As Well As We Think?,” the authors summarize their findings: “Five experiments suggest that this limitation is often underappreciated, such that people tend to believe that they can communicate over email more effectively than they actually can.”¹⁵

When you restrict yourself to typed-out text, the absence of nonverbal communication leaves your emails emotionally void and, therefore, more difficult to understand. As you labor through crafting the message, you know your intended meaning. You see it and hear it in the words you wrote, but your recipients may not. We're not as good at it as our egos tell us.

Something else your recipients may overlook is that you're a thinking, feeling human on the sending end of the message. A recent study subtitled “Voice Reveals the Presence of a Humanlike Mind” compared perceptions and consequences of text communication versus voice and video communication. A “fundamental” finding: when you rely on plain text to communicate with others, the effect is to dehumanize yourself in their minds. As listeners, we assign intention, emotion, and other human qualities to the speaker. As readers, however, we fail to associate the words on the screen with a thinking, feeling person. “Across six experiments, people who listened to natural speech (or actors mimicking natural speech) consistently believed communicators were more thoughtful, competent, agentic, and likable than people who read their speeches or read their writing.”¹⁶

The authors acknowledge that a highly skilled writer may be able to humanize their writing but confirm that randomly selected readers don't “spontaneously humanize the text as they are reading.” Listening is different. Voice is so humanizing that we even apply its benefits to our phones. In their study, people who used Siri on their iPhones saw it as more mindful, intelligent, responsive, friendly, and sophisticated than smartphone users who didn't use the voice feature. We have more positive impressions of messages delivered by people we can see or even just hear. We have greater empathy toward the communicator when we can see or hear him or her. Intergroup conflict and prejudice often begin by dehumanizing “them” or the “others”; social conflict is more effectively managed by restoring “their” faces and voices.

Hiding behind a cloak of digital anonymity, cyberbullying, trolling, and igniting flame wars online is the theme of an important opinion piece published in the New York Times. In “The Epidemic of Facelessness,” writer Stephen Marche connects the absence of the human face to significant communication and behavior problems. He draws on Plato's 2,400-year-old myth about the Ring of Gyges, which makes its wearer invisible at will, to illustrate the disinhibiting effects of not being seen and the corrupting effects of anonymity. Today, the Gyges effect is used to describe these monstrous behaviors of “keyboard warriors” who hide behind the screen as they say things they'd never say if they had to look the person on the other end of their cyberbullying or trolling in the eye.

The resolve is clear. “As communication and exchange come at a remove, the flight back to the face takes on a new urgency,” writes Marche.¹⁷ Whether in sales, marketing, support, project management, or any other role, you can't afford to continue relying exclusively on faceless digital communication. We need to rehumanize our communication and our businesses.

SO, EMOJIS?

An emoji or emoticon may have a “face,” but it's an insufficient replacement for a smiling human. If you get especially friendly with your customers or clients, you may add emojis to your business communication. Over the days, weeks, or months of a B2C sales process that starts a customer lifecycle, the relationship may reach that level of comfort, familiarity, and informality. But not every client or client relationship is the same.

If instead you're in B2B enterprise sales and trying to close a six-, seven-, or even eight-figure deal, it's unlikely that the SVP or C-level executive will accept your crying, laughing, round yellow “faces” as useful and professional expressions – at least not until the relationship is well established. Your truth likely falls somewhere in between these two examples, but you should know your recipient before dropping an emoticon as a substitute for your absent, human face.

We add emojis to make clearer the intention of our words and to add a little personality or flair. Are you serious or are you joking? Punch in that smiley face. But which smiley face does your recipient get? And do they read it the same way you do? Different operating systems often “speak” different emojis and different people often interpret the same emoji differently. The authors of a study titled “‘Blissfully Happy' or ‘Ready to Fight': Varying Interpretations of Emoji” found that only 4.5% of emoji symbols examined “have consistently low variance in their sentiment interpretations. Conversely, in 25% of the cases where participants rated the same rendering, they did not agree on whether the sentiment was positive, neutral, or negative.”¹⁸

In other words, emojis and emoticons don't make things clear; they add to the misunderstandings. But that hasn't slowed their use. As they become more common, they become more acceptable. Still, they can't compete with human, nonverbal cues for context, clarity, meaning, intention, or connection.

REPAIRING EMAIL

While our communication fragments across email, text messaging, messaging apps, social messaging, social networks, or other channels, we're still restricting our most important and most valuable messages to plain text far more often than not. Most of your communication and exchange comes “at a remove,” to use Marche's words. Well intentioned or not, you often don that cloak of digital anonymity. You're hiding behind the same black text on the same white screen, even though you've got a lot riding on your messages' outcomes. There's a new urgency to repairing email – to making “the flight back to the face.”

Whether you're teaching, training, or selling, you add so much meaning and value to your communication. As you'll soon understand clearer than ever, people need to see you. Trust and rapport. Attention and understanding. Accuracy and transparency. These are all achieved faster and more effectively when you make the flight back to the face.