Home » Insight Collections » The Way Organisations Speak To Each Other Is Broken
An article for Executives, Technologists, and Decision-Makers – the email has transformed from a vital line of communication into a daunting barrier to productivity. This article addresses the challenges of email inefficiencies and explores solutions for organisational communication.
Why should you read this? Because in a world where time is the ultimate currency, gaining control over your email could be the key to unlocking a new level of operational efficiency and strategic insight. Discover how to transform your email into a powerful business tool.
The way organisations speak to each other is broken
Emails are a staple form of communication for businesses globally, yet in some ways, we have lost control of them. Nowadays, having an email address is like being on a street that’s swarming with door to door salesmen. Every morning, you wake up to a letterbox rammed with junk flyers.
In the decades after email’s inception in late 60s, early 70s, AOL, Outlook and Gmail democratised email addresses – and since then, we’ve commoditised filling them up with ‘stuff’, including lazy, light-touch sales emails. The modern day B2B buyer receives roughly 11 cold emails each day that they know of – the rest is caught up in spam filters.
However, from a business context, this approach is not just time intensive, but it’s also expensive. Email made asynchronous communication ubiquitous across organisations and set a clear technical standard for messaging. In an effort to curb the influx of spam emails, more and more folders emerged; junk, clutter, focussed, other – not to mention the spam filters IT teams then deploy on top of these in an attempt to keep things manageable. But the abuse scaled in an ongoing arms race between businesses and inbound irrelevant content.
The History Of Spam
The first reported case of spam took place in 1978, as a political announcement – which incidentally was the first instance of a mass email campaign. However, the concept of spam as we know it today is thanks to Gary Thuerk, dubbed the ‘Father of Spam’ after his 400 email campaign resulted in an impressive $13 million in sales. Unfortunately, what was once perceived as a useful-turned-lazy sales technique, has now become a weaponized tool for cyber criminals. Despite blocking efforts, spam continues to be a significant issue, with over 3.4 billion phishing emails sent daily, contributing to 90% of data breaches.
The evolution of business communication
Email paved the way for digital communication, with instant messaging (IM) platforms springing up across the decades. Pandemic-initiated remote working only accelerated this global domination, as tools like Slack and Teams took internal communications away from the inbox. This fuelled workers’ desires for a singular platform that could ‘replace’ the various traditional comms tools.
But our email inboxes still exist, ever decreasing in value, sitting in the background collecting spam and the occasional newsletter we forgot we subscribed to.
So does that mean that email has no place in the corporate world?
No, not necessarily. Without email, teams would lose a lot of intra-organisational value-add – the newsletters, the valuable sales approaches, the general check-ins with their colleagues. And the same can be said for people outside of their organisation that they’re yet to meet but would genuinely be of interest to them.
Emails provide a level of professionalism that IM platforms cannot replace. And while they’re currently known for being a hotspot for spam and irrelevant content, there’s still huge amounts of value to be unlocked if used correctly.
Fixing the problem
Unsurprisingly perhaps, the answer lies in technology. Powerful tools like AI can elevate emails above the graveyard of spam that it’s become, and turn it into a valuable tool for businesses once again.
Imagine an inbox that knows you and is configured to take all the content you receive, filter it, read it, summarise it and suggest actions to you in an instant. This is what AI can do. This is particularly useful in two ways: scanning inbound emails from sales teams and creating insights-driven newsletters, which can be written and personalised by AI, triggered only when something relevant is found.
Truthfully, this isn’t a flawless approach; nothing is. Scaled AI-powered outreach will be abused in the same way traditional emails still are, and the junk folder arms race will continue. However, with AI we have an opportunity to make email a genuinely useful communication channel between organisations.
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