I’d like to share some tips that will make your e-mail more effective without making you any less efficient in sending it. These tips may require forming
some new habits or resetting some options in your e-mail server, but
all of them are simple. Several of these tips are just matters of simple
courtesy. Or common sense.
Eight Tips for Better E-Mail
1. Choose a businesslike e-mail
name.
2. Use the subject line.
3. Sign your e-mails.
4. Avoid writing too informally.
5. Limit your use of emoticons and acronyms.
6. Be polite.
7. Write to be read on the computer.
8. Check it before you send it.
1. Choose a businesslike e-mail name. Calling yourself Redneck
Geezer@gmail.com might be fine if you’re exchanging messages only
with your buddies. It’s a poor choice if you’re trying to conduct business.
If you work for a business or organization, it probably has a
protocol for e-mail accounts, including how your name is set up, so
this isn’t much of an issue. However, if you’re self-employed, it’s
worth thinking about. Will you be taken seriously if your e-mail
messages come from fuzzybear@yahoo.com? And getting a domain
name that mirrors your business’s name isn’t too difficult or veryexpensive. Your Internet service provider can probably help you with the
process. It’s worth the effort.
Your e-mail is much more likely to be recognized and read if it identifies
who you are and where you work: george.stallings @adventcorp.com, for example.
2. Use the subject line.
It’s foolish not to use the
subject line. And it seems a
little rude, too. When I get a message with nothing in the subject
line, even if it’s from somebody I recognize, I feel a little irritated.
Couldn’t they spend five seconds and give me a clue as to why
they’re writing? Plus, with the huge gush of spam that’s gets flushed
into our inbox each day, we all need to go through and quickly delete
everything that looks suspicious. If I don’t immediately recognize
your user name, and there’s no subject line in your message, there’s
a very good chance I’ll delete it. I’m sure you do the same.
Maybe even more important, the subject line is your first and
best chance to help your readers figure out quickly whether they
want to read your message. Maybe you think that everyone should
read every word of every message you write, but that’s just not going
to happen, so your second best goal should be to make the reading
process as simple and painless as possible and to make your message
look relevant and interesting.
A good subject line should be clear, specific, and short. Short is
particularly important, because it may get truncated, depending on
how your recipients have their e-mail systems configured. They may
see only the first half dozen words in the subject line and have to
guess from that whether your message is worth reading.
3. Sign your e-mails. Put your name at the end of your message
and follow it with your contact information. Your contact information
should include your full name if you typically sign your e-mails
with a nickname. For example, if you sign them “Meg,” you shouldwrite “Megan T. O’Brien” afterward. In addition, include your job
title, the organization you work for and your telephone number(s)
in case the recipient wants or needs to call you. Some people also
include their mailing address as part of their signature block.
As you probably know, you can set your e-mail system up to
add this information automatically every time you write. Even better,
you can set it up to put a different signature block after your
messages depending on whether you are authoring a new message
or responding to one somebody sent you. In the case of a reply, it
seems reasonable to assume that a shorter version of your signature
would be adequate—just your name, your organization, and your
phone number(s), for example.
4. Avoid writing too informally. One reason e-mails fail is the
fact that people tend to write e-mails much more casually and informally
than they do business letters or other documents. That informality
is possibly a consequence of the T-shirt and flip-flops culture
that gave birth to the Internet in the first place, but the fact is it can
lead to some embarrassing errors. My guess is that the frequency of
misspelled words, grammar mistakes, punctuation errors, and similar
goofs is a lot higher in e-mails than it is anywhere else in business
communications.Everybody loves compliments, and I’m certainly no exception.
But those smiley faces . . . Ugh.
5. Limit your use of emoticons and acronyms. Smiley faces
don’t belong in your business e-mails. “Emoticons” is the term applied
to the various combinations of punctuation used to express
emotion and to the actual icons that show little faces in various
states of happiness or distress. For example, : - ) indicates happiness,
while : - O is supposed to suggest surprise. Using these things
is all right if you’re sending an e-mail to a good friend, to a child,
or to a message board, such as one where you can anonymously
post your feelings about your favorite sports team. If you want to
show that the quarterback’s performance in last week’s game made
you feel sick, go ahead and stick in the green, queasy-looking6. Be polite. At the opposite end of the spectrum from the excessive
chumminess and breathless excitement that we see in some
e-mails, there’s the problem of rudeness. Some people are so tone
deaf to the sound of their own language that they don’t realize their
messages sound rude. Other people just don’t care. Either way, it’s
inexcusable.
“Flaming” was a common problem in the early days of the Internet.
Flaming is the act of attacking another person, his ideas and
opinions, his lineage, his sexual orientation, and anything else you
can think of throwing in the mix, often in obscene or foul language.
These messages are usually written by cowardly little nerds who
would never have the courage to say anything like that to another
person’s face. However, they seem to have a lot of courage when
they can write anonymously on some Web forum. Flaming seems
to have died down a lot in recent years. That’s good. The World Wide
Web needs all the civility we can muster.
The problem with rudeness is subtler than flaming someone. Occasionally
people write e-mails in the heat of strong emotion—anger,
disgust, fear—and those emotions lurk in the tone of the message.
face. But no emoticons in your business e-mails, please. They’re
inappropriate.
7. Write to be read on the computer. On a flight I was taking a
few months ago I noticed the woman across the aisle from me take
out a thick sheaf of papers from her briefcase. It was obvious from
the formatting that they were e-mails she had printed out. Intrigued,
I watched her for a few minutes. She put the stack on the
tray table in front of her and attacked them, pen in hand. Most of
them she simply skimmed quickly, then drew a line through. On a
few she scrawled some comments at the bottom of the page. As
she finished each page, she tucked it under the stack and kept on
moving.
8. Check it before you send it. If the message matters, write it
and edit it outside your e-mail system. The temptation to write an
e-mail inside Outlook or Notes or whatever e-mail system you use
is almost irresistible. Usually it doesn’t matter. Even though we know
that we’re more likely to make mistakes and that the editing tools in
our e-mail system are only a subset of what we have in our word
processor, we opt for convenience rather than caution.
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