Ah, email. It’s simple. It’s familiar. It’s…outdated and painfully slow. 🐌
Sure, it’s good for formal discussions or sending important documents. But, as we rely more on digital collaboration, it’s become clear that email just wasn’t designed to handle large-scale, collaborative communications.
Luckily, there are lots of email alternatives that are designed to support global real-time collaboration . And by embracing one, or multiple of these email alternatives, you can accelerate the productivity of your collaborative tasks.
Still not sure whether you’re ready to move on from email? Don’t worry. We get it! To help you see where we’re coming from, let’s quickly look at why email is ill-equipped to meet your modern business communication needs.
Then, we’ll share eight of the best email alternatives and communication tools to streamline your team and business communications . 🙌
3 Reasons Why You Need an Email Alternative
Email is where collaboration goes to die.
No, seriously, we’re not exaggerating; 70% of employees think email is a huge productivity drain.
Why?
Because, unlike other hybrid workplace solutions , email lacks the features and flexibility that promote effective collaboration.
Let’s take a look at the three main issues with email. 👀
1. Email isn’t appropriate for a real-time feedback loop 🔁
Feedback guides our continuous, agile improvement. The quicker and more regularly you receive feedback, the sooner you can use it to make informed changes.
The thing about email, though, is that it’s notoriously slow and unreliable.
Imagine you’ve emailed a document to ten people for review. Now, how long will you have to wait for them to reply?
A few hours? A day? A week or two? In fact, how do you know they’ve even seen your email at all? (Cue the passive-aggressive follow-up email.)
Without the ability to facilitate a real-time feedback loop, email leaves development and growth inching along at a snail’s pace.
2. Emails can easily be lost in threads 📨
Email is an information cul-de-sac.
After a couple of back-and-forth messages, locating specific information in an email thread starts to get difficult—and that’s just when it’s a one-on-one conversation. Add a few other people into the mix, and finding specific information in a thread is like trying to find a grain of salt in a sandbox.
In fact, 73% of employees say that they spend too much time trying to locate emails. 56% find the whole hunting-for-documents-in-their-inbox task extremely frustrating.
3. Email isn’t agile 🐌
If you want to create a masterpiece, you need to be able to have agile collaborative conversations. Ideas should ebb and flow; plans should develop intricacy; elements should get scrapped and improved upon as your project takes shape.
Email doesn’t just make agile conversations difficult.
None of your conversations are happening in real-time. Large email threads get confusing and hard to navigate. Employees are left out of the loop with new developments, leading to knowledge silos and wasted productivity. All of these issues have the power to damage your internal workflow and the quality of your projects.
8 Email Alternatives for Business Communication
All is not lost—there are plenty of email alternatives that you can utilize for your business communications.
First, let’s look at project management software.
1. Project management software
A huge chunk of your business communications revolve around project management software , right? But have you ever tried managing a project over Gmail or Outlook?
It’s tedious. It’s confusing. There’s no central storage system for file sharing, no real-time feedback loop, or project visibility. And it’s all because email platforms just aren’t built for project management.
The solution? Project management software.
The solution for email enthusiasts? Email project management in ClickUp !
Best Tool: ClickUp’s Email Project Management Software
Manage your emails and work in one place—Send and receive emails anywhere in ClickUp, create tasks from emails, set up automation, attach emails to any task, and more
If it’s painless project management you’re after, then ClickUp delivers. But what exactly makes ClickUp a five-star project management tool?
Well, project management software like ClickUp is designed to streamline your project management process and helps individuals and teams of all sizes boost productivity by bringing all their work into one place.
Flexible and advanced features let you easily assign and keep track of tasks, effectively manage multiple to-do’s, set up custom automation, communicate in real-time with team members, and much more—all in one centralized platform.
ClickUp also prevents your business communications from tangling into a spider’s web of chaos. It centralizes communications and provides you with end-to-end visibility of every single conversation (complete with secure email service, of course).
With the Email ClickApp , Outlook, IMAP, Office 365, and Gmail users can connect their email accounts to ClickUp to send and receive emails directly from a ClickUp task, making it easier to streamline communications, keep track of conversations, and save time from jumping to a different tab to manage emails. 📧
Send and receive emails within ClickUp to streamline email management
Not only can you send and receive emails directly from tasks, but you can:
- Add file attachments, canned responses, branded forms, and more
- Link emails to tasksAssign comments is the Senior Manager for Content Marketing at Dialpad. She is passionate about communicating a brand’s design sensibility and visualizing how content can be presented in creative and comprehensive ways. Jenna has also written for other domains such as FreshySites and BlockSurvey .