Reply, Forward, Delete: Making E-Mail Effective

Are you an abuser?  Do you torture your peers, boss, and employees with cryptic, poorly written emails with no clear objective?  Good electronic communication skills are increasingly valuable as the bulk of business (and personal) communication is being shifted to email’s welcoming shoulders.  Using email effectively is more than etiquette: it a time management survival skill

Effective business email can be personal, engaging, and even fun.  The challenge is to make sure your email is understood in the way you intended.  Your email message must include clues that make it easier to read and respond to while avoiding ambiguities and confusing syntax.  You remember that there are times when email is not appropriate: urgent messages, strong criticism, honest compliments, delivering subtle points, venting frustration, and hiring/firing.

Know your objective

Before we delve into the finer points of email, the first thing to consider is the objective of your message.  An email’s raison d’etre tends to fall into four categories:

1. Collaboration email is bi-directional.  It expects the reader to respond in some way.  Typical collaboration emails involve answering questions, voting, taking some action, routing information to another person, submitting an opinion, and coordination between people for meetings.  If you want collaboration, you should ask people to respond.
2. Communication email is unidirectional.  It expects the reader to digest the information but does not require a response.   Typical communication emails are for sharing information, providing follow-up details, meeting minutes and agendas, official record keeping, and critical alerts.  Spell out your follow expectations so readers know if they need to reply.
3. Broadcast email is a generic message for a wide audience.  It hopes the capture the readers interested, but may not get read.  Typical broadcast emails include news clipping services, random bulletins, vacation notices, corporate policy.  Remember, tell people not to respond or you may get flooded with responses.
4. Personal email has a very different objective and guidelines than business email.  The consequences of mixing personal and business information into the same email can be range from embarrassing to catastrophic.  Typical personal emails include actual letters from friends, correspondence with recruiters, new and stock updates, broadcast jokes, chain letters, check-this-out links, shopping promotions, SPAM, and uncountable time wasters.

When you craft an email, consider your objective and give your reader clues about what you expect them to do with the email.  For example, to indicate the email’s objective is communication, you write:

Subject: Meeting Minutes

 “Here are the minutes from our last meeting.  Please reply only if you have changes”

If you need collaboration because there are still action items from the meeting, you may write:

You must clearly indicate what you expect the reader to do when they read your email.  If you cannot figure out the objective of your email, you should break it into multiple emails or rethink your message.

To the point

Now that you know why you are sending an email, you want stay focused on your topic.  If you are going to spend more than 15 minutes writing an email, you should be writing multiple emails or you need to consider another way to get your point across.  For example, I have gotten carefully worded emails that must have taken an hour to write from people who should have called me and said, “You did not listen to my opinion in that last meeting.”

On the other hand, avoid blasting out emails like machine gun rounds.  Your emails should be self-contained and include some context to help the reader.  You are definitely losing ground if someone must read three different emails to get your point so do not expect busy executives to go digging for minutes from last week’s meeting to understand your critical points.  Including the history of replies is an excellent example of maintaining context.  If the history is not enough, cut and paste the information you need into the email. 

You must also remember that people read email by subject, not by delivery date.  It is very common for people to read their most recent mail first and to skip messages will dull subject lines.

Beyond knowing your objective and keeping to the point, here are also some basic email format rules.  Email does not necessarily follow the same rules as telephone conversations or written letters there, but it does have specific etiquette:

Concentrate on Readability

• Proof read and spell check your email.  People do notice and care.

• Use complete sentences and normal capitalization.

• Correct grammar makes email readable and reduces the risk to misunderstanding.

• You can use all capitals (sparingly) to HIGHLIGHT IMPORTANT WORDS.

Make your point

• Make the subject line clear and effective.  Please include the date and times for meetings in the subject line.

• It is OK to put the whole email in the subject.  There is no standard for this, but I recommend prefixing the subject with an “*” so your reader knows that there is no body message.  For example: “Subject: * Please complete your expense report by 4:00 PM.”

• Keep sentences short and break ideas into paragraphs.

• If you want a reply email, ask for it. 

• If you want a call, ask for it and then include your phone number.

• Never bury a question you want answered in a paragraph.  Does that make sense?

Be smart with links, attachments, and history

• Always include the message history.  Some people like comments inserted between the history lines, others do not.  Either way, you should alert your reader if you are going to embed comments in the history.

• Avoid attachments that could have been embedded into the email.  People do not like opening attachments because it takes so long.

• Sending links to a web page is fine, but take the 30 seconds and copy a paragraph of the page’s contents into your email as a “preview.”  It dramatically increases the chance that your reader will try the link.

Correctly address your email

• Address your email to make it more personal.  Put your reader(s) names on the first line and when sending to a group start with “All.”  If you are sending to several people, list all their names.  When you are sending to one person and CCing others, include the CC people in parenthesis.  For example, Rob (Chip & Jimmy).  This helps your reader know your audience and if she is the main recipient.

• Include your “signature” at the end of your message (before the history).  You signature should be you name plus contact information.

• Use BCC when you should protect recipients’ email addresses and always use it when sending email to a group of unrelated people like a committee or when forwarding a joke.  Your email address is personal information and should be protected like your home phone number.  It is very hard to change email addresses or get off SPAM lists. 

• Avoid using BCC for business communication.  It offends people and you will be found out.

• Never use “reply all”

Do not email nuances

•  Eliminate sarcasm and inside jokes.  They will not be understood when the email is forwarded to your boss.

•  If you are struggling to find “just the right words” to say it, then don’t: use the phone.

•  Skip the emoticons (making faces with punctuation marks like :-) or ;-o) because they are not commonly known. Rewrite your email if you need to add an emoticon to clarify sarcasm or an inside joke.  This is not true for personal email.

My Signoff

As you journey into the brave new world of electronic collaboration, just remember three things.

1. Use the computer (spell check, cut-and-paste, and hyperlinks) to help your reader.
2. Email is electronic communication, but you are communicating with people.
3. Anything you email can and will be stored and forwarded against you.

Since I am certain that MidrangeERP reader’s email skills exceeds average, I hope that you will pass these suggestions on to email abusers.  In fact, why don’t you just email them a link to this article: www.h-consulting.com/articles/email.htm.