As we’ve introduced more ways to communicate, we (and more importantly our customers) have spread our communication over many channels, leaving less concentration on any one channel.
When we only had a desk telephone, you could reach more people on it, as that was the primary channel for communication. Your prospects picked up the phone when it rang, as it might be their customer or family on the other end.
Then we got cell phones. Now you could give your cell number to just the important people and not let others know your secret cell number. Once you’ve given the important people your cell number, you don’t have to pay as much attention to your desk phone.
And we got email. At first it was rather novel–you got emails from people you knew. But over time email devolved into the same type of situation as “junk mail”. Your email box became full of marketing emails and newsletters you forget you signed up for. Every now and then a real person would appear in your inbox, but you must scan through dozens of junk emails to find them. So, now we scan our emails before reading. Scan.
Then we added social media to the mix. At first it was really social, but now social media is full of marketing messages. So, we started scanning social media posts too.
And now…we’ve got a growing number of texts coming into our phones and some of those are spam.
People have their own preference to which of these “channels” they pay most attention to.
Some people still pick up their landline, some people virtually never answer their desk phone but respond instantly to a text, some people reply very quickly to email, and some respond weeks later, saying things like “I don’t check this email very often”. As you get to know a person, ask them, or try to discern which channel(s) work best for them.
If you’re prospecting and you don’t know someone yet, try a multimedia approach.
It’s fine to start out with the channels that are easiest and cheapest for you. Email is probably the easiest and cheapest for most of us. If you’re using a referral approach or a “bird of a feather” approach, good old email may work on its own. In fact, one email with this kind of social capital built in, may get the job done.
But this will not always be the case, simply writing one email is not always going to work. Our potential customers are frazzled, they have other priorities than responding to us, and their attention is fragmented over many channels and attacked by thousands of marketing messages per day.
Realistically, we may need to put in more effort than one email.