Communicating Persuasively, Email or Face-to-Face?

Jeremy Dean writes "Our intuitive understanding is that face-to-face communication is the most persuasive. In reality, of course, it's not always possible to meet in person, so email wins out. How, then, do people react to persuasion attempts over email? Persuasion research has uncovered fascinating effects: that men seem more responsive to email because it bypasses their competitive tendencies (Guadagno & Cialdini, 2002). Women, however, may respond better in face-to-face encounters because they are more 'relationship-minded'. But is this finding just a gender stereotype?"

Comments

you can't persuade using email .....

[petes_PoV]

..... all yo can do is plead!
A lot of the art of persuasion requires the persuader to apply some form of pressure (usually non-physical) onto their intended victim. This makes the victim cave-in to remove the pressure. Email just doesn't have that kind of "presence" (see todays Dilbert) it's just too easy to ignore it.

The best you can do is have an overwhelming reason why your request must be complied with - and to CC the email to your victim's boss.

On the other side, email is a great leveller. People who would not normally speak up for themselves can be quite eloquent and demonstrate sharp insights when they have time to compose their messsage, and aren't shot-down/cut-out by people with louder voices or fewer social qualms

Just try being a telecommuting director some time

[unfortunateson]

I telecommute to a company six hundred miles away, and persuasion by email is impossible.

I send proposal after proposal, request for comment after request, but most of my coworkers -- which are located in the same facility -- see non-customer emails as the lowest priorities, and consider them pretty much ignorable.

My boss (non pointy haired, but not much better) included.

And I'm a pretty persuasive writer (maybe not this message).
But if it doesn't get read, it doesn't get responded to.

So at least once a month, I have to commute to what has become my least favorite airport in the US, just to get a face-to-face decision or committment.

Re:Email has failed

[blahplusplus]

"Email has failed"

Speak for yourself buddy. Email and IM are enormous boons to keeping in contact and making friends who share common interests across the world, what is slashdot if not a giant email discussion list in the form of a bulletin board?

The real problem I believe is that email isn't personal enough and good videocamera's integrated into computers for "email" the next big thing is vloging or "vlogging" if someone finally made a workable video phone with optional image broadcast with a decent display and ratio adjuster, that just worked everywhere. It would sell, believe you me.

Learned early and from my mother...

[bifodus]

...that you can't communicate effectively unless you can get an entire point across without interruption. If I need to actually persuade someone, nothing makes more sense than email. With verbal communication, the listener can butt-in whenever they feel like it, and do many things to ultimately conceal my point.

I'd think

[ucblockhead]

It'd depend more on the person trying to do the persuading. Who hasn't met someone who in person has great charisma but writes emails like "so dude u shd totally do it it rocks!!!!" Who hasn't met someone who in person fumbles around with speech full of "ums" and "uhs", but writes clear, concise and persuasive emails?

Re:Nothing Ever Happens Over Email.

[AusIV]

Interesting. I'm a college student and do some free-lance web design for grad students with my extra time. On two different projects, I've been introduced to my client by e-mail, discussed what they need the site to do, negotiated a price, delivered the finished product all by e-mail. In one case, I picked up the check in person - meeting my client for the first time. In the other case the client sent a check through campus mail and I never met them in person.

Re:Email has failed

[vertinox]

Email has failed only if you use it for marketing or as a persuasion tool. As for communicating information it works fairly well.

However, perhaps we should be looking at these other problem... Persuasion.

Personally, I'll have none of it and I don't understand businesses that get talked into deals with cold call sales vendors. (Cold call in the industry means they call you first rather than the customer calling the sales department)

First of all, if you are running a business you should not have to persuade your employees, coworkers, or higher ups. Persuading your employees to comply shouldn't be that hard of a task and if they don't then it isn't because you aren't a good persuader but rather perhaps they are the wrong employee for the job (or perhaps you are asking them to do something they simply can't do or isn't actually their job in the first place).

However, persuading higher ups and coworkers isn't your job either. If you have to do a song and dance with a power point presentation every time to the CEO every time you need to get something approved to do your basic job functions then perhaps your employers don't trust you or they just don't care well enough to put into place a system into which you can perform your job independently but with oversight. Of course thats more of a management issue...

As far as getting customers, emailing as a form of communication is of course spam unless they contact you first via email for information. Cold calling is of course the same thing as telemarketing...

Doing both may actually loose customers and make a good deal of people angry at you.

As far as people traveling for that "big sales" meeting... I just never understood.

If you are a company in need of a product... Why do you need someone persuading you to buy theirs over someone else. Their art of persuasion doesn't make their actual product or services any better and in fact if your company buys products based on these sales meetings perhaps someone should look at if the vendors are giving out benefits of persuasion to the managers who are authorized to spend said money.

In fact, people with authorization to buy products or services should be hired on the sole fact they are not easily persuaded and do not take bribes from vendors. They should be the ones cold calling the vendors and then asking for plain cold information in emails and then not respond to the vendors relentless voice mails and not wasting company money going to meetings with countless vendors when they already know what product/service the company should buy.

Anything else is just hurting the buying company's bottom line, but I suppose that is why I don't work in marketing.

Re:Perhaps another interesting question applicable

[MightyYar]

Mod this guy waaaay up... the key to getting better working with people is NOT to hide behind a computer. If persuasion is your goal, the guy going face-to-face will always beat out the guy exclusively using email. That is why the world still has salesmen.

Re:Perhaps another interesting question applicable

[timeOday]

I think you have a point about writing being better thought out. The problem is, some people simply don't work that way. I know a couple guys at work to whom I just don't bother writing detailed emails, because every time I've tried, it's obvious they simply don't read them, no matter how important they are and how well I craft the language.

Similarly, I used to wonder why people travel to expensive training courses when you can get all the same information from a book - which is usually better organized and from a more authoritative source, anyways. But I've realized, many people simply do not, and will not, sit down and master the information in a book to save their lives. Even successful people. You have to sit them in a room with minimal distractions and engage them face to face.

Re:Just try being a telecommuting director some ti

[redelm]

My sympathies. But I'd say your problem stems mostly from a lack-of-attention [ignorability] more than unpersuasiveness. Your colleagues ignore your emails, yet you don't ignore theirs. The telecommuter is often a second-class corporate citizen. Especially since the boss doesn't see any need to make adjustments.

The real thing is you are probably asking people for things that will cost them and not give back much except to the corporation via your projects. They're busy, so will ignore you if they can. But it's amazing what you can accomplish if you let others take the credit for it.

Re:Just try being a telecommuting director some ti

[vertinox]

So at least once a month, I have to commute to what has become my least favorite airport in the US, just to get a face-to-face decision or committment.

Like I said in a post above, if you find yourself having to persuade management constantly to make decisions in order to do your job, then it is usually a management problem. Usually they have given you responsibility without authority to act on those responsibilities (usually your management has the reverse in those instances... authority without responsibility) so you can't work independently without having to do a powerpoint presentation for every task.

Usually, this may stem from management not trusting you or their apathy towards what you do outweighs the effort to put in a system in place to have some sort of oversight. And if they aren't responding to your emails then chances are they are just are too apathetic towards what you do which is not the fault of email, but rather management....

Which ironically the only way to resolve is to persuade them to be less so.

I could be horribly wrong about your situation in particular, but I wouldn't blame email as the core problem.

Re:Medium has to fit the message!

[petes_PoV]

I usually avoid communicating a complex controversial idea verbally

Actually I do the opposite. The reason is that people's expressions are the most reliable indicator of whether they understand and/or like what they are hearing. If you talk through a complex issue, it's much easier to see where they are getting hung up. You can then spend more time talking about the parts your audience misunderstands or disagrees with.

Email is too slow for this kind of interaction and phones just don't give you the full body language feedback.

Re:Face vs Email

[anothy]

When considering F2F vs. Email think about the following as well. Face to face, you have to think on your feet and "roll w/ the punches" while emails can be much more crafted, thought-out, and cogent.

you write like this is a cost or risk of face to face communications, but in fact (at least in my experience) it's the biggest benefit. in several ways.

first, note that there are lots and lots of cases where the person you're communicating with will explicitly be trying to gauge your ability to respond to those sorts of issues. job interviews are the most obvious, but it also comes up in vendor selection, especially in situations where you're likely to have only one (or very few) people you're working with, rather than a faceless company. all sorts of partnership arrangements, too. i imagine it's less of an issue for purchasing decisions.

also, keep in mind that the person you're communicating with will almost certainly have questions you haven't anticipated, regardless of how well thought out your message is or the form it's presented in. if they can ask the questions and get a response interactively, that round of communication ends with them feeling mostly satisfied; if they have to wait for a response to email, that uncertainty has the opportunity to sit and fester in their mind. they spend more time associating you with a feeling of uncertainty than satisfaction.

lots of people are really bad at forming their questions back to you electronically, too. ever gotten questions back to email in-line when the question's answered later on in the document? or had someone miss a point because they have to take information from two different parts of your document together? all those things are much easier to resolve quickly in an interactive session for the recipient of the communication.

Re:Depends on the recipient

[podperson]

The more technologyically-friendly one is, the easier it is to persuade them by email. The more details-oriented one is, the easier it is to persuade them by email. The more "frat boy and golf games" on is, the harder it is, typically, to persuade them over email.

You need to read TFA.

The point you're making is simply wrong -- the study actually showed no such relationship between technology usage and persuadability via email. On average (according to the studies), persuasion via email works about as well as face-to-face (for men) but not women if the women haven't met. The studies didn't cover cross-sex interactions.

You can ignore the results, assume they're wrong, or make use of the information constructively (e.g. by making an effort to contact a woman more directly to establish a working relationship before trying to influence her via email).

Another implication of the work is that you're more likely to persuade a man via email if you have an adversarial relationship with him. Again, this does not gel with your frat boy golf games assumptions.