We use email without evening thinking about it. It's both automatic and instinctual to whip off a message to anyone we know – friends, coworkers, supervisors – and expect them to not only read our message but also understand exactly what we meant.
Unfortunately, that’s frequently not the case. Effective email communication seems to be a hit-or-miss delivery system more often than not.
Check out these five shocking statistics about the state of email communication today.
#1 - 144.8 billion emails are delivered each day.
If these emails were letters, they would fill all the homes in Annapolis, Maryland, every day. That’s a pretty overwhelming amount of information we’re being bombarded with on a daily basis. In this vast sea of information, are you sure your message is being delivered? If the post office can make mistakes, so can your computer.
#2 – 112 daily emails are received and sent on average by a business professional.
Hooray for having an overflowing inbox . . . said no one ever. A stack of printed emails from an office of 150 people would be as tall as the Empire State Building over the course of a year. We are busy, busy, busy, creating and sending lots and lots of messages.
#3 – 42% of corporate email is ignored.
Well, sure. If your inbox is overflowing with messages that all look the same, you’re probably only going to read the ones that look the most important or time-sensitive. After all, there are so many hours in a day. And, of course, every sender thinks their message is the most important one in their recipient’s inbox, but just because you sent it doesn’t mean they’ll open it.
#4 – 50% of emails are misunderstood.
So you actually get someone to open your message, and it turns out they took what you said the wrong way. Sound familiar?
Text-based messages are notorious for causing misunderstandings between the sender and recipient. The majority of these misunderstandings are caused by the lack of verbal/facial cues that are abundantly present in a face-to-face conversation, such as tone of voice and body language, and that help accurately convey the message’s intent.
Without these visual/auditory cues, recipients must interpret the content on their own based on how well they know the sender. An inaccurate interpretation can cause all kinds of personal and professional problems, both for the sender and the recipient.
#5 – People switch applications 30 times an hour.
It’s the age of digital distractions. Frequent switching between applications to answer emails means that precious minutes are lost refocusing on the previous task. If all of these minutes were added up, it would be enough for someone to have an additional part-time job.
Add Visuals
Video in marketing email increases conversions by 100%. Yes, you read that right. The power of video is indisputable with everyone from Apple to Zappos (see what I did there?) using videos to drive customer engagement and increase brand awareness. And, of course, all of the social media sites offer some kind of video-sharing feature. Why? Because we are a visual society drawn to images and heavily impacted by the things we see.
Fortunately, it’s easy to add videos to messages these days with smartphones and cutting-edge, multimedia engagement tools.
Add Interactive Components
Suppose you’re a sales manager sending out new product information to your sales team that is scattered across the country. It would be nice to know that they read and understood the important message you sent to make sure everyone is on the same page, right? Adding something simple like a survey or questionnaire at the end of your message is a great way to see who’s on board with the new info and who isn’t.
Unfortunately, with regular email, you’re often limited in how many components you can send because of the maximum attachment size of 25MB. And that’s not much when you start adding elements like this:
Fortunately, there are multimedia engagement tools that allow you to add multiple interactive elements without having to worry about file size.
Stop being frustrated by the low percentage of recipients engaging with your messages and start increasing their interaction with help from the latest email communication technology.
Sources: Radicati Group, MessageMind Survey, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Communications of the ACM, Marketing Sherpa