Email is going nowhere. Despite what you may have heard from Slack, Facebook, Whatsapp or other chat focused companies, email is here to stay. You can’t get away from that fact that EVERYONE has an email address and EVERYONE knows how to use email. It’s the lowest common denominator amongst electronic communication.
Another thing that email has going for it is that sending a message to lots of people it no more complicated than sending to a single person. Just add their names to the To: field and off you go.
As long as people keep using “Reply to All” you can keep a conversation going amongst a group of people with very little effort. Everyone can be using their own email client on whatever device they choose, replying in their own time or even composing responses offline. Super. Easy.
This sort of low friction, familiar, group communication really has a lot going for it. New conversations can be started in seconds, most email clients do a reasonable job of keeping a searchable archive, and adding things like pictures or attachments is easy. All-in-all this is probably why group emails use is so ubiquitous that we don’t even consider it as a ‘product’ or ‘app’, it’s just email doing its thing.
Everyone who has used group email like this will also probably encountered some of its shortcomings like someone forgets to click reply-to-all or the confusion which ensues when someone moves jobs and needs to change their email address. It’s at times like this when you just need a little bit more structure around your free-flowing just-add-everyone-in-the-to-field approach.
If this is you then Gaggle Mail does a great job to provide that structure without forcing everyone to sign up to a new app or even move out of their email client.
Gaggle Mail gives your group its own email address so instead of sending you a message to all everyone’s individual address you just sent it to the one address and Gaggle Mail makes sure everyone in the group gets it. You don’t have to worry about not clicking reply-to-all since there’s only one address to reply to. And also if someone’s email address changes, just update it in the group list and nobody else needs to do anything.
Group email is a superb tool but if your group needs just a little bit more structure, then give Gaggle Mail a try for free to help keep things on track.