Emma Brudner says, “Trends tend to go in cycles. There’s a reason for the saying “what’s old is new again” — if something was popular once, odds are it’ll come back sooner or later.

Modern sales practitioners and experts spend a lot of time talking about ways to optimize sales emails and social media messages for the best response rates. But could it be that face-to-face is actually the way to go in our digital times?Researchers from Western University recently studied the effectiveness of different communication channels to get people to take a survey, and the results spoke loud and clear.

“We found that people were much more likely to agree to complete a survey when they were asked in-person as opposed to over email,” Vanessa K. Bohns, assistant professor at Cornell University, wrote in an HBR article. “Face-to-face requests were 34 times more effective than emailed ones.”

Bohns attributed this stark difference to two factors. The first is what face-to-face interactions offer that emails lack: Nonverbal communication. “W hen we replicated our results in a second study we found the nonverbal cues requesters conveyed during a face-to-face interaction made all the difference in how people viewed the legitimacy of their requests,” she wrote”.

Research Reveals a Tactic 34X More Effective Than Email [New Data]

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