yesterday I read that superhuman is going to launch a new feature that makes the inbox collaborative. email clients are something I've been thinking about and have liked since Palabra, and probably from before. for a while now I've been asking myself: what comes next for email as we know it?
problems email clients have today
I'd like to start by defining the problems email clients (and email as we know it) have today.
- 90% of email is junk. almost everything I get is subscriptions or cold emails. only a small share is actually directed at me, matters, and needs a reply. I guess we could split email into two buckets: sales and not sales. another way to slice it: for-reply and not-for-reply.
- the email that does matter is hard to find. when I do have an email I need to reply to, it gets lost in a sea of other things that don't matter.
- a lot of the format is outdated. there's something strange and anachronistic about writing a message like it's a letter, sending it, waiting for a reply, with no basic metrics out of the box like open and click rate.
- search doesn't work. if I want to find something I received at some point, I usually can't. AI could help here, but none of the email clients I use today do a good job with it.
I think a basic email solution should fix these points: classify emails well out of the box (separating for-reply from not-for-reply), let me search messages quickly and intelligently, and update the format so it feels more like a chat.
what's next for email
watching a demo of what a collaborative inbox could look like got me thinking about two things: 1) how I'd win if I wanted to build an email client, and 2) do all groups of users use email clients the same way? (it feels to me like sales, mkt, cx, and personal use all use an email client in completely different ways.) how would I build an email client just for one of those groups? what would the ideal email client for sales look like?
building an email client for sales teams
some features I think this group needs:
- a shared inbox across the whole team.
- integrations with hubspot and salesforce.
- integration with multiple email accounts (so you can do outbound properly).
- integration with linkedin and sales navigator.
- click and open rate out of the box.
- tracking on whether the other side opened an attachment I sent.
- integration with calling software.
- integration with calendly or similar so you can book calls.
- a calendar view that's easier to see (like superhuman, but done well).
- followup automation. being able to automate a sequence of emails toward a target goal.