Every few months, a think-piece appears declaring that email is dead, replaced by Slack or Teams or whatever the latest platform is. And every few months, those think-pieces are sent to their editors... by email.
The "email is dead" narrative misunderstands what email is and what it does. Internal chat tools are fantastic for team communication. But for external business communication - the stuff that actually generates revenue - email isn't just alive. It's irreplaceable.
The Universal Protocol
Email is the only digital communication channel that works across every business, every platform, every country, every industry. Your client doesn't need to be on the same platform as you. They don't need to download an app, create an account, or accept an invitation. They just need an email address, which they already have.
Try asking a potential client to join your Slack workspace to discuss a proposal. Watch how quickly that conversation dies.
The Professionalism Factor
Chat messages are informal by nature. The medium encourages brevity, casualness, emoji. That's perfect for asking your colleague where they want lunch. It's less ideal for sending a £50,000 proposal to a corporate client.
Email allows you to be as formal or informal as the situation requires. It supports proper formatting, attachments, signatures, and - crucially - a subject line that lets the recipient understand the message's purpose before opening it.
The Record That Holds Up
Email creates a natural paper trail that's searchable, archivable, and legally admissible. When a client says "we never agreed to that," you can pull up the exact email thread. When you need to reference a decision made six months ago, it's in your sent folder.
Chat messages can be edited. They can be deleted. They scroll away into an infinite feed that nobody will ever search through. For anything that matters - contracts, approvals, specifications, agreements - email is the record of truth.
Asynchronous by Design
Chat tools create an expectation of immediate response. That green status dot is a constant pressure. Email respects the recipient's time - it arrives, it waits, it gets answered when the recipient is ready.
For external communication, this is essential. Your clients are busy. They don't want to be pulled into a real-time conversation every time you have an update. They want to read your message when it suits them and respond thoughtfully.
Where Chat Wins (And Email Doesn't Try To)
I'm not anti-chat. Slack and Teams are brilliant for internal team coordination, quick questions, and casual collaboration. They reduce email volume for the stuff that was never suited to email in the first place.
But that's exactly the point: they complement email, they don't replace it. The businesses that thrive use both - chat for internal speed, email for external substance.
Investing in Email Is Investing in Revenue
Since email remains the channel through which business is actually conducted - proposals sent, deals closed, clients managed - the quality of your email infrastructure directly impacts your revenue.
Professional email on your own domain, with proper authentication and reliable hosting, isn't a legacy technology choice. It's an investment in the communication channel that generates more business than all the chat tools combined.
Email isn't dead. It's just so fundamental that people forget to appreciate it.
