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Is the use of professional email communication in the very center of your business life? Do you think that email is dead, or just changing? There’s been much turmoil when it comes to e-mail and its use, ever since the rise of instant messaging. In this article, we will explore the importance of e-mail for business purposes and prove that email is not dead. Not only is it still alive, it’s now used as a primary way to communicate in the business world.

🚀 Read: Customer Experience Guide: How to Put your Customers First? 🚀 

Importance of Professional Email Correspondence

Email channel is still one of the best things on the Internet. Why? First, we should consider some email facts. Research by Statista shows that currently there are around 4 billion email users and this number is about to grow up to around 4.48 billion in 2024. People prefer email for business communication because you can reach it easily on your mobile phone. It’s easier and they have a feeling they are more flexible with it during the day. Apart from that 99firms reports that 85% of users check their emails on a smartphone.

Picture 1. Email Traffic in 2023

So email is here to stay, and it’s not going anywhere any time soon. According to statistics, email is still the dominant form of communication in the business world.

“The Mobile Email market has shown strong growth over the past year, a trend that is expect to continue. Anywhere access has become a common feature for all users, who now access their email from several devices, at any time and from any location.” – Executive summary, E-mail Staticstics Report

Email Is Great as a Support Channel

In contrast to popular belief, email is actually a tremendous open platform. With the explosion of new communication systems, many assumed that it will decline, but this can’t be more wrong. As Momchil Kyurkchiev says in an article for Forbes, “as marketers push forward into the unfamiliar territory of data-driven customer engagement, email is not faltering — it’s just getting its second wind.”

Consequently, it can’t be killed since it represents a different model from the closed ecosystems we see proliferating across our computers and devices. It’s like a cockroach crawling around the internet, in a positive way. Due to all the changes occurring around it, its overall experience has also been transformed.  Email is not dying, it’s now unbound.

Email as the Best Thing on the Internet

Because it developed early in the history of the commercial internet, email is a great support structure for many other things. Moreover, it is still the foundation on which the internet is built on. In the days before Facebook became a true alternative for verifying one’s identity on the web, a valid email address was the main gateway to accessing any online service. For example, if you want to verify a bank account – you needed to do that via email. What about other services, like Amazon or forums? Everything requires a valid email address. It is still the primary communication channel for business and direct social communication on the Internet. So, professional email communication is necessary.

Email is also a digital package-delivery service.  The key to its productivity is the ability to attach files to your email message. Can you imagine the internet without the ability to append documents into a conversation? Email is far from the ideal transmission and storage medium, but it’s still the primary channel for business communication. It has also become much smarter and easier to use, retaining ubiquity and interoperability. These things come in handy when you’re trying to write a business e-mail.

There is no need for promoting email as a product. It looks great on phones and renders quickly, which is its biggest asset. Alexis C. Madrigal has a great argument that proves the importance of email as a business channel:

“They are super lightweight, so they download quickly over any kind of connection, and the tools to forward or otherwise deal with them are built expertly and natively into our mobile devices.” – Alex C. Madrigal

7 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Sending an Email

Before sending a professional email, here are a few questions you should ask yourself first:

1. Is the message suitable for email?
2. What is the purpose of sending this email?
3. Do the formality and style of my writing fit the expectations of my audience?
4. Have I used correct grammar and punctuation? pssst- help yourself with available grammar tools to make the best impression
5. Is the message easy to read?
6. Have I highlighted the dates in the text?
7. Have I provided enough context for my audience to easily understand the message?

3 Professional Email Best Practices

Powerful subject lines

Avoid subject lines such as hello or hi and instead try to make a subject clear. Those lines are not informative so therefore they don’t give the reader the idea of how important your message is. So, try to be specific if you want to get an answer.

Also, for messages that include meetings, try to put a date into the subject line so people can see immediately when the meeting is happening.

Clear Messages

Messages need to be clear and concise so people could easily understand it. So keep your sentences short and to the point. Also, the body of the email should be direct and informative, as it should contain all pertinent information.

Be Polite

As Mind Tools said:

„Messages you send are a reflection of your own professionalism , values, and attention to detail, so a certain level of formality is needed.“

So avoid slang, informal language, inappropriate abbreviations, and jargon. Avoid emoticons with people you don’t know well. You can make your own set of emoticons, but make sure you’ve already talked to those people.

If you want to learn more about emoticons and what benefits can they offer to your business, check our blog post: Emojis in Business Communication.

Then, depending on the situation, close the message with “Regards” or “Yours sincerely”. Also, since face-to-face communication lack in this type of communication, be aware that the wrong choice of words can happen. Punctuation or capitalization can be misinterpreted without visual and auditory cues.

Email is Not Dead

In general, email is mobile-friendly and renders beautifully on devices. There’s a lot of companies that strive to achieve just that. If we look at old email messages, we can see that they are doing this effortlessly. Email is one step forward to a less commercial, less centralized web. The best thing is that it’s still the strongest communication channel in the business world, and it will probably never stop being that. In the end, let’s quote two authors and their opinions about email.

“Email is not dead because people want to write to one another, using their email accounts, in more than 140-character bursts.” – Neil Schwartzman, Executive Director, CAUCE

Correspondence by email is the number one way of conveying relevant information in an official and concise manner, as professional business communication requires more than 140 characters.

“Email is not going to disappear. Possibly ever. Until the robots kill us all.” – Paul Buchheit, founder of FriendFeed

Is there a chance that email might disappear? Its format and relevance may change over time, but there is no doubt – there’s no professional communication without it.

Email Trends in 2021

2020 was all about personalization and this trend is definitely staying. A personalized message has a much higher conversion rate, so much more is going to be explored and implemented this year as well.

Apart from personalization, there are two more trends, which will develop further – interactivity and optimization for mobiles. Interactive emails tend to be more fun and therefore more likely to be read. And with the rise in the use of mobile phones worldwide, optimizing emails for phones has become a must.

Picture 2. Email trends

As for new trends in 2021, the rise of chatbots and AI is inevitable. Chatbots can contribute to better customer satisfaction, a higher percentage of engagement and an overall better user experience.

Voice technology is becoming more and more popular, as well as the use of social media and this is why many companies already integrate their email and social media marketing strategies.

Read Top Email Marketing Trends for 2021

Conclusion

With new forms of communication emerging every day, email may well be considered to be superfluous or maybe even old-fashioned. But it definitely won’t be forgotten any time soon. Email services are doing their best to adjust emailing to today’s fast pace with continuous improvements of spam filters, easy-to-use platforms, possibilities to categorize and prioritize your messages, even with “predictive-response capability”, all in order to meet your needs of a quick and effective communication. And they are still succeeding in playing a vital role in the business lives of many users worldwide.