Gunter Gerdenitsch's ONLINE COMMUNICATION
10 Tips for Professional Emailing
September 25, 2003
A good primer from Gunter Gerdenitsch on the basic rules of professional emailing.
Recently I received a number of emails, written such as if their writers had disregarded the basic rules of professional emailing deliberately. - Or, what are the rules, anyway? - I can't remember ever having seen a text with a list of things to keep in mind when writing an email. So I decided to compile such a list myself.
1. Avoid any Smack of Spam!
Now and then you just can't get around opening an email conversation from scratch. That is, contacting a person who never received an email from you before, who might not even know anything about you from a third party. Then your chances are good that your email is not read, not even opened, but deleted right away.
Therefore, you should be aware of whom you are contacting, in what matter, and what you want to achieve by your email. Is your contact person someone who, by all experience, is very sensitive to spam (e.g. an academic)? Then you should make sure that already your "Subject:"-line gives him/her a good reason why your email is worth reading. Keep it short, avoid capitalization and any exclamation mark (not to mention a string like "!!!!!!!!!")
For the first sentence of your email, it's a good idea to exercise a "humble demeanor". Such as opening by: "I regret to take your time, but ...", "Sorry to drop in on you, but ... ", or similar. For deciding of how to open your conversation, you should be very aware of your email partner and his/her relation to you.
2. Keep it short!
It's simply a sign of lacking respect of your partner's time, if for reading you are robbing any more of it than necessary. (What IS the "message" you want to convey? What do you want to achieve by your email, anyway? Write it down in the most concise wording you can think of!)
It's not only impolite, taking more time for reading than what's justified by its informational substance. Also the time for downloading is straining your partner's nerves. (Remember: During that time many of your partner's other activities might be impaired!)
A good rule of thumb is to keep your email within the limits of one screen, without scrolling if possible. (There's a slight qualification in place here: The email browsers on the market are very different with regard to their "screen" opening. Anyway, if you can, try to say what you have to say within some 12 lines at 65 characters each. Then your chances will be good even on the smallest email browser.)
A useful trick to keep your emails short is, if you have your own web site, to prepare an isolated page there, and just to provide a link to it in your email. There is no link to that isolated page from your web site. So, if you choose an unusual name for it, a casual visitor will hardly ever find it. The only way to get to it is, following the link you provided in your email.
Remember: The real name of an isolated page does not have to be overt in your email. An inconspicuous name can hide a complicated "password") If you want, you can give it an additional sense of urgency - indicating that this page will be posted "only till ... "
3. Write for Reading-from-Screen!
Only rarely your emails will be printed out, only if they are very meaningful. So, when you look at it psychologically: if your email partner is de facto forced to print it out because on screen it is nearly illegible - how will that be perceived? Aside from the molestation of having to print it out, perhaps even as a sort of "usurpation", withholding it from your partner to decide if your email is meaningful or not.
For writing a text good for reading from screen, you should follow some rules:
- Break the matter down to sub-topics of which each one should take not more text than one screen (without scrolling, if possible). For each sub-topic, find an expressive title.
- If you want to be very communicative, all the titles should be assembled to a list right at the beginning of your email. At the end of each sub-topic, a link "top" should make it easy to go back to the top of the page. (Look what I did with this article!)
- Each sub-topic can comprise one or more paragraphs. Each paragraph should be not more than some 3-6 lines. It is useful to have an empty line between two paragraphs. If you have a string of several short paragraphs, you can save room by writing it as a bulleted list (such as these paragraphs).
- Each paragraph should comprise some 1-5 sentences. Each sentence should be not longer than some 2-3 lines.
- In your sentences you should avoid unusual words. (What is "unusual" depends on your email partner, of course. Anyway, what good is it if your partner has to refer to a dictionary for every other word?)
- Be careful with your styling! You might feel great when you have introduced fine nuances in your text, reflected by bold, italics, underlining, several fonts, etc. But remember: your partner might have still an old email browser (text-only, no HTML). So, at the receiver's side, all your nuances will be lost. Will your text still be easy to read, nevertheless?
- Therefore, you should use fine styling (bold, italics, etc.) only to put some stress on words or sentences that will still be meaningful when reduced to text-only. If a stress adds significantly to your message, you should use capitals or centered text (offset by empty lines).
4. Careful with Attachments!
Some email professionals, who are receiving hundreds of emails per day, live by the rule: "Never open an attachment!" Indeed, email attachments are a popular way to smuggle in a computer virus. Once infested by a virus, computers normally can be "sterilized" only by a thorough re-formatting of the hard drive, followed by a complete re-installation of the system. For a stand-alone computer that's bad enough - yet, today many computers are linked into a network. A virus can spread from one computer to all the others within seconds. And "sterilizing" a network can hold operations for several days. - So you will see why this rule is justified.
I have a virus protection installed on my computer. Still, when I receive an unexpected email with an attachment to it, I use to click "Explore Attachment" first and run an explicit virus check on it before I open it. The damage that could be caused by a carelessly imported virus is just too great!
So, if you want to send a text to a professional like e.g. a journalist, you better include it in the body of your email. Offset it from the introductory sentences by a horizontal line.
Even if you know that your email partner will have no problem with an attachment, you should never send a "stand-alone" attachment. That is an attachment with no word of the body text referring to it. Remember: It's always taking time for your email partner to open an attachment. In a sense, you need to "sell" it. You should give your partner a good reason to open it. Otherwise odds are that it will be deleted along with the email, when the body text has been read (if at all!)
On the one hand, you should "keep it short". On the other hand, you should avoid attachments. A good way out of that dilemma is the trick with an isolated page uploaded to your web site (see 2.)
5. Any Reply within 24 hours!
Internet is a fast-paced world. In emailing it has become customary to expect any reply from one's email partner within 24 hours. Quite evidently, only rather simple matters can be settled within that time. Many people tend to think that email is good only for reporting completion. Even if it takes a few days - they expect the sender to put up with waiting. In pre-email times, he/she could pick up the phone and ask what's going on, when impatience got the upper hand. With email, however, your partner might be living in another continent, he/she might not speak your language well enough to phone you.
So, you should send any reply within 24 hours. Even if it's just "I can't tell you, yet". But you should be able to indicate the time span till there's an outcome to be expected. At the very least, you should let your partner know the reason for the delay. If a third person is involved, you might also be able to tell your partner his/her address.
6. Answer Point by Point!
A good technique for professional email exchange is the following:
- Copy each point you want to enter into, from the email you received from your partner.
- Paste it into your reply. Keep it unchanged, just give it another color (e.g. blue).
- Answer this point by a few sentences. (Your text should be in normal color, i.e. black).
- Repeat that for all relevant points in the received email.
Thus, you cannot only save time and typing. It is also a very powerful method to tear your partner's arguments to shreds. You can even push it to the extreme and submit your partner to a mild form of "cross-examination". (You can uncover a weakness e.g. by saying: "Here you say … But in point … you said: … How do you explain that difference?")
That's why it is important to copy exactly the original text (including your partner's typos, if you want to do it really harshly!).
7. Make Sure your Partner can Identify your Email!
Sending out many emails and (hopefully) receiving replies is just a part of my job. In doing that, sometimes I get a reply that's looking quite interesting. I am tempted to take up the conversation right away. So I try to find any indication as to the organization of which my partner is a member.Sure, I have the "From:"-address; but that's sometimes not very informative. Sure, I am always keeping records of all the addresses to whom I sent my emails. Still, some of the replies' "From:"-address is simply not existing in my records. It seems, any of my addressees has passed on my address, and so I got a reply from a different address.
Fine with me - but I would like to know in which way the respondent got my address. If I knew, I could possibly react more to the point. So I sometimes can do nothing better than replying: "Contacting you is quite interesting to me - but, who are you actually; how did you get my address?" (Sure, not a very professional way of emailing ... !)
So, you should make it a habit to close all your emails not only by typing your name. Instead, prepare a signature file (or better several 'sigs', one for each category of your addressees). With most of modern email systems you have an option by which you can direct your system which of your sigs should be included automatically.
This holds out an additional benefit to you: Your email sigs are a costless way of doing advertising. You should include your name, several ways to contact you, and one sentence on what you are doing and what's making you noteworthy. Thus you can even embark on "viral marketing": you never know whoever will get your sig before the eyes!
8. Keep Copies of all your Emails!
It's a good idea to keep copies of all your emails, incoming as well as outgoing. Today, in times of gigabyte hard disks, that should be no problem. Even if, you should consider to keep offline-copies of your very old emails, say, on CD.
By having copies of your old emails you will have the following edges on your email partners:
- Incoming emails:
You can nail down your email partners exactly to what they said before, when you reply: "How do you explain the difference to what you said in your email of (date): " and then you repeat verbatim the wording in the old email. To make it more dramatically, you can combine that with the point-by-point method mentioned above.
This will give you an aura of being absolutely on top of things. Your email partners will realize that they can't tell you one time the one thing, some time later the other.
- Outgoing emails:
You can make sure never to repeat yourself. If you are forced to rehash a matter you thought settled already, you just need to repeat the main point and support it by something like "..., as I told you in my email of (date)" .
And, perhaps even more important: By comparing to your old email before you are going to say something in the current email, you avoid slipping into a contradiction. (Remember: Your email partner might have a copy of your old email, too. Nothing would make you look more unprofessionally than becoming entangled in contradictions!)
9. Tips on HOW to save Copies
- Save your copies orderly!
One big advantage of email over conventional conversation is that once you have set up appropriate "filters", incoming emails are automatically archived in the respective mail box. The mail boxes can be stacked hierarchically.
You could, for example, have one big mail box "Clients" which, in turn, could hold mail boxes for various client segments, which, finally, could hold all the emails incoming from each client. Within them, the individual emails can be sorted chronologically, alphabetically by the name of the contact person or by the subject line.
If you set up your email filters that way, you can easily have any old email right at hand within seconds.
- Make sure your date-and-time stamp is correct!
Sometimes it can be quite important if you can tell your email partners the exact date and time of their emails. For example, I remember when it came to a hard bargaining when an email partner claimed that he had already taken into account a price reduction due to a point I brought up now. How surprised he must have been when I showed him exactly that at the time of his price calculation he could not yet have known the point I made now (indicating, he lied evidently). So, in his next email I got the price reduction.
To sum up, be sure that all copies of your emails are stored with the correct date and time of their arrival. (Another reason why you should watch your computer's system time - your email software derives the time stamp from it!)
10. Choose Attachment Formats Carefully!
Are you sure, your partner can open your attachments at all? Amazing how many emails are sent across the land with attachments of the most unusual formats. Anyway, it's at least impolite to block your partners' line for the time needed to download a file that is not useful to them! - As a rule of thumb, you should limit you attachment formats to those that can be opened by standard Windows tools: .txt (accessible e.g. by NotePad), .doc (Wordpad) , .htm , .jpg , .gif (
Now and then you cannot help sending an email with an attachment in a non-standard-Windows format. Then it is nothing but polite to tell your email partner where to get an appropriate tool. I for one, when I need to send an attachment in .pdf-format, I use to tell my email partner:
You can download a .pdf-reader for free from
http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/readstep.html
Gunter Gerdenitsch is an international IT-specialist with focus on Communication. IT service providers - looking for a freelancer for peaks in your workload, want to get your ideas across? Then you should visit http://www.ITspecial.org or mail to gg@ITspecial.org
Copyright © 2003, Gunter Gerdenitsch, All Rights Reserved.
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