A lot of London firms still treat customer communication as a job for the email list and nothing else. The habit goes back years. Newsletters go out on schedule and promotions follow close behind, and when response rates sink a little lower each year, most teams will write it off as how email works now.
Meanwhile, the customers moved somewhere busier. They’ll confirm a delivery on WhatsApp, reply to an appointment text within minutes, tap a push alert from their bank, then let a promotional email gather dust for a fortnight. Reaching them starts with knowing where they’ll reply, and for a fair chunk of the country, that stopped being the inbox years ago.
The inbox lost its monopoly years ago
Look at Ofcom’s 2023 research on online communication and the scale of the change gets hard to ignore. WhatsApp alone reaches 76% of UK adults, and around two thirds now call it their main way of communicating online, which leaves the old channels fighting over scraps. The texting figures back this up. Annual SMS and MMS volumes crashed from a peak of 151 billion down to 36 billion in 2022, while online messages sailed past 1.3 trillion a year.
Those numbers hide a decade of change. Most marketing plans never caught up, because where customers can be reached moved far quicker than how firms try to reach them, and the mismatch now shows up as ignored emails and missed appointments.
More channels doesn’t always mean better: It can easily mean more noise
Now, plenty of firms respond by adding channels, then trip over the wiring. An SMS tool gets bolted on here, a WhatsApp tool there, and before long the business will end up with three systems that have never once spoken to each other, each with its own sending schedule. A complaint is usually what exposes it. By then the same offer has gone out by email at 9am and by text at lunchtime, turned up on WhatsApp that evening, then landed as a push notification the next morning, and that customer has reasonably concluded the business hasn’t a clue who they are.
Opt-in rules make it worse. A company that can’t see one tool from another will sooner or later message a customer who withdrew their consent months back, and at that point the regulator gets dragged into what started out as a marketing problem. Fines have landed on UK firms for smaller mistakes than that one.
Solving it is almost never as easy as just paying for another tool. Businesses that get it right will route everything through a customer engagement & automation platform built around a single customer record that reaches each contact on whichever channel they reply to and falls back to the next when a message fails to deliver. That way, every reply feeds the same record, so when a delivery update has already gone out on WhatsApp, no email version will fire behind it, and which channel works best stops being a guess.
What each channel actually does best
Email still has a clear job. No other channel handles detail properly, which is why invoices, contracts, onboarding guides and anything a customer might want to dig out six months later should end up in an inbox where a search bar can find them. The other channels justify themselves by covering what email can’t.
- SMS should carry the urgent stuff, like delivery windows or appointment reminders, since around 90% of texts are read within three minutes of landing.
- WhatsApp can do everything a text can, and the buttons, images, read receipts and proper two-way thread will make it the stronger pick whenever a conversation might go back and forth.
- Push and in-app messages will only ever reach people who already have the app, but they’ll pull them back without going anywhere near the inbox.
- Voice should be saved for the moments that genuinely need a person on the line, like a failed payment on a big order or a customer who’s already halfway into a complaint.
One rule covers all four. Match each message to whichever channel that particular customer actually answers, and accept that for a growing share of the people on any UK contact list, email stopped being the default a while back.
Start with where the replies come from
Forget the trend reports for now, because a quick audit of last quarter’s messages will say far more about a single business than any industry average ever could. Check which channel produced real replies, bookings, clicks or repeat orders for each type of contact. The pattern tends to jump out. Reminders that get ignored by email yet answered by text within the hour have already made the decision for you.
Email keeps the paper trail, obviously. The long reads will stay right where they’ve always been too, since a contract or a receipt belongs somewhere a customer can still search for it months down the line. Treat the inbox as one room instead of the whole house, though, and far more of what goes out will come back answered.
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