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The 30-second e-mail

Guest post by: Robert Whipple

Article Overview: If you are frustrated by e-mail, this article may help you be more skilled at getting your messages out in a way that people appreciate.

The 30-second e-mail

You know how it feels. You are grazing your bloated inbox, and you see the name, Sam Jones. You cringe. Having waded through his prior tomes, you know that opening this e-mail will tie you up for at least 15 minutes trying to get the message. Sam writes really l-o-n-g notes and rarely uses paragraph breaks. He does not capitalize the start of sentences, so his writing is hard to decode. You pause, and pass the note because there is just not enough time to deal with the hassle.

Don't be a Sam Jones! Follow these seven simple rules, and people will appreciate your e-mail communications.

1. Make it easy on the reader. Have a well formatted and short note that deals with a single topic in compressed format. Don't ramble!

2. Don't go "over the horizon." Try to have the majority of your notes fit into the first window of a note. Reason: when the reader can see the start of your signature block on the bottom of the opening window, he knows that is all there is to the note. That is a psychological lift that puts the reader in a better frame of mind to absorb your meaning. When the text goes beyond the first page (over the horizon), the reader has no way to know how long your note is. This is a psychological burden that frustrates the reader subconsciously.

3. Aim for 15 to 30 seconds. Try to have the e-mail compressed enough that it can be internalized in a half minute at the maximum. It will be remembered much more than one that takes 5 minutes to read.

4. Use bullet points. Short, punchy bullets are easier to read than long complex sentences.

5. Highlight expected actions. Delineate action items in a way that is not offensive. Do not use all caps. Sometimes bold text works, but I find it best to have a separate line like this:

Action: Please get me your draft report by Friday.

6. Be polite. Start with a friendly greeting and end with respect but not long or trite quotations.

7. Sometimes the Subject can be the whole note. In this case use EOM (End Of Message) to designate there is no note to open at all. It looks like this:

Subject: The Binford celebration is Wednesday 3 pm. EOM

If you follow these simple seven rules, people will pay more attention to your e-mails, and you will improve the hit rate of your communications. Not all notes can follow all of these rules, but if the majority of yours do, you will be greatly appreciated.

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Article Tags: brevity, concise, email, laconic, online, seconds, short



Related Forum Posts
Re: Email Marketing Benefits - Email marketing is a kind of direct marketing used by marketers to communicate with potential or existing customers directly by means of email. In email marketing, sales letters are never sent in an unsolicited way, and every person on an email marketing list, gives permission and agrees to receive email messages from time to time. Here is what you should expect from email marketing service: - Automatic subscribe and unsubscribe. - Automatic removal of bad email addresses. - Automatic message delivery. - Message sending speed and flow control. - Message personalization. With such an email marketing software, you will get a great enhancement in business or e-commerce.
Re: When is your interest peaked by unsolicited mail? - Do you ever worry about accidentally deleting an email from a new friend or client just because you're not accustomed to seeing his/her email address (or let's say his/her email gets sent to your spam box in error)?
Re: Autoresponder v Blog Feed Subscriptions... - They get updates by email only. Your question prompted me to check out the Feedburner email subscription page and I noticed down the bottom that you CAN view the email addresses of your subscribers. Feedburner.google.com => Publicize ==> email Subscriptions: scroll down to the bottom and click "View Subscriber Details". You can also modify the first email notification that goes out, include a link to a logo for branding purposes and set the time of day you want the updates to go out. Pretty neat! DH
Re: When is your interest peaked by unsolicited mail? - [quote="Kevin":ok9irszy]Do you ever worry about accidentally deleting an email from a new friend or client just because you're not accustomed to seeing his/her email address (or let's say his/her email gets sent to your spam box in error)?[/quote:ok9irszy] Hi Kevin, I do look at the name of the sender (or email address) and check the headline just to make sure it's not important, such as an inquiry about something. If I'm still not sure I will open the email just in case. I have had this scenario happen before as you mentioned. So yes, always a good idea to withhold from hitting the DELETE button until you're absolutely sure it's spam.
Re: How to Manage Your Emails - I have 3 different junk mail accounts, one of them with over 7968 email, I checked today. The last week, I didn't have any time to access my email, and on Wednesday night, after coming home I thought to myself, why not check your email? I had over 400 new emails in my inbox, only 300 in the spam folder, and it's all thanks to gmail filtering system, because I had over 160 mail going striate to the trash folder and other email filtered and archived. I am still going through those emails.


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