As you can guess, I’ve been away on vacation, and when back, had to dig out from under before updating this blog. We’ve been furiously getting our marketing (and development) ready for the fall, back to work season. Our biggest trade show of the year is coming up at Dreamforce 2007 in San Francisco, next week so we are in full swing getting ready for it. This includes putting together a funny, 30 second video that will show how much stress and work, ActiveConversion can save our customers. I will post it here when it’s ready.

Speaking of the future, I saw an article about a Datamonitor report that states email has overtaken telephone in the the workplace. This is surprising, given the ubiquity of phones, especially to the older generation of workers.

It states that 100% of workers used email while only 80% used telephones. Who would have thought?

It only on to state that email is considered more productive by workers than the phone - which stands to reason. Email can document things, to so many more people, a better record of what workers require to get their job done. In many ways, an email is more valuable than a phone number now, as it can be used to communicate to someone, whether they’re at work, home or on the road (think Blackberry).

From our standpoint, email is preferred to telemarketing as an outbound marketing tool. Emails can deliver a message, unobtrusively but also without interruption. In addition, it makes response easy to get. Prospects also tend to prefer it because they can respond in their own time. They can also sort it, refer to it, use it as a bookmark, forward it etc.

Of course, email has its drawbacks too. Besides spam, a worker can expect upwards of 50 per day just from people working in the same company. How many of you haven’t lost productivity due to an overflowing inbox? Or to messages ‘lost’ because they are so far behind the ‘new’ messages of the day?

On the other hand, while on vacation, I had only a couple of calls the whole time, sitting in my voicemail when I got back. So what we lose to email, we gain back from not talking on the phone. And with my Blackberry, I handled most of my email responses while on the beach and golf course and came back to less stress and work pileup.

This IS the future.