Email best practices

Do you use abbreviations in email? How about emoticons? Unless you know your recipient well, you should probably avoid both abbreviations and emoticons or smiley faces. What else can you do to make your email clear to the reader? Well, the one tip most people seem to forget is use a clear subject line. Studies show most business users can't handle more than about 50 messages a day. You know if your recipient gets that many, some of them probably aren't even opened. So help the reader out by making your purpose clear with a good subject such as Agenda for Wednesday meeting. Here are some other etiquette tips to produce better email and better results.

Dear Reader,

How do you start your email? Is "Dear ____" too formal? This Wall Street Journal article suggests that the use of dear as a greeting is incorrect. It is either too initimate, if you don't know the reader, or too impersonal, if the reader is someone the writer already knows. However, just launching into the content of the mail is too abrupt, according to one etiquette expert. Is "Salutations" or "Hey" any better?

Wall St Journal article on email

This article about mistakes made in email should be required reading for anyone using email for business. Personally, I have not grown to love Twitter, though I hope that its appearance makes people learn the value of brevity, since there is a 140 character restriction on content. The WSJ article points out the value of short, clear content and useful subject lines. Which email would you open first - one titled "Meeting" or one titled "Your action items from Friday's meeting"? The article also contrasts the meaning of Dear Betty, and Dear Betty! Have a look, and see if it doesn't spur you on to higher quality in your email communications.

How to say goodbye

Maybe it's a sign of the times, but here's a great article on how to write a final farewell email to your co-workers. The author points out that there is no standard etiquette like you might find for general email. What are some of the author's suggestions?
- err on the side of less information rather than more
- limit the melodrama
- be gracious to your supporters
- use humor sparingly
Actually, those are pretty good rules for most email.

The snippet matters too!

By now, most writers know that an email subject line should have some content in it. Emails with subjects like "Hello" are not as likely to be opened as ones titled "Monday Meeting Agenda," or something else that will indicate what content is in the email itself. However, how much energy do you spend crafting a good first line? This short article points out that as more and more people read email on portable devices like Blackberries and iPhones, that first line becomes more important, since it's visible before the email is opened, and may determine whether it's opened or deleted. As is often true, it comes back to knowing who your audience is before you write. If you know your reader is likely to read the message on a portable device, then be sure to write with that in mind.

What does marketing email look like?

I don't know about you, but I cannot wait for this election to be over. I can finally reclaim my radio station which has been hijacked by often repeated political ads, my phone which I don't answer unless I recognize the number, and my email in box which should have fewer impassioned pleas for funds for this or that candidate or cause. No doubt the results will be followed by the post-mortems discussing what this or that candidate did right or wrong. Regardless of who you support, this post describing stylistic differences between the presidential candidates' emails is pretty interesting. The writer makes the point well that you need to understand your medium and your audience. Email isn't just an electronic version of a printed letter. Good email is short and easy to scan, with text broken into small blocks, and possibly with a few eye catching graphics.

How to Avoid Turning into "Ketchup Trousers"

Here's a great cautionary article from Fortune Magazine about the perils of email, and how to avoid some of them. There are several unfortunate tales in the article, including one about an executive who demanded his secretary pay his small dry cleaning bill because she spilled ketchup on his pants. She forwarded the email, and he got a new nickname. Remember that your email is out of your control once you hit the "send" button, and don't put anything in email that you would not be comfortable wearing on a sandwich board. The article also talks about how new software can analyze volumes of email looking not just for obvious key words like "insider trading" but also less obvious signs of a problem, like late night mail, purposefully ambiguous wording ("that thing we talked about"), and signs of anxiousness.

Writing Good EMail

I don't know about you, but I have a tendency to leave email in my "in" box for future reference. The mail software I use for my personal account, Thunderbird, makes it easy to sort messages by sender, so I can find messages, and the mail server I use for work, Gmail, allows search by any text string, so I can find most mail that way. But when I am scanning a list of mail from a single person, it sure helps if the message titles are meaningful. This is one of the tips mentioned in this excellent article at Office Watch about creating good email. By the way, that site is full of good information about a range of software subjects - The Office for Mere Mortals section describes how to do any number of things in Office that you might find useful: working with Watermarks in Word, for example.

And in the meantime, make sure your email titles mean something. "Check it out" is not as useful as "Picture of the Recent Blizzard."

Take a Deep Breath, Count to Ten

Is business communication suffering from hastiness? That would be the claim in this article about how communication is changing. The examples noted are mostly of emails fired off in haste, but the consequences are alarming: everything from a one day 22 point stock drop to a some very bad press. The solutions suggested by the author are nothing new or fancy, just a return to the basics: focus on the audience, practice good writing skills, be sure to edit and proofread your work before you hit the send button. But you knew that, didn't you?