Email is a pain in the proverbial. Yet it's also a great tool.
I've been using email for more years than I can remember. Certainly well over 25.
Most bad aspects of email have burnt me at one time, or another. But it's also got me out of a few holes where I've had to prove to managers with "bad" memories what I said and backed myself up with an email.
Back in the 1990’s at the end of the last millennium and in the distance past of the Internet the Electronic Messaging Association estimated that more than 94 million users will send over 5.5 trillion e-mail messages in 1999."
By 2000 8.2 billion emails were sent every day and the prediction was that this would rise to 26.1 billion per day by 2005. And this excluded bulk email.
On just one day, the 25th March 2004, more than one million new spam emails were sent.
So we haven't quite reached the doom-laden prediction in the nineties. But we still manage to fall foul of a lack of email etiquette
... Your Ten Tips For Email Health ...
The following is a list of the things you should avoid when writing emails:
1. Don't instantly type in a response because you're annoyed. If you send it the chances are it will upset someone and possibly damage your career!
2. Don't use emoticons or things like '(grin)' you just don't know how that sort of thing is received in a business communication. I can vouch for seriously upsetting some people for putting '(grin)' in some emails to them. The intention was to be friendly but the opposite happened and they felt they were being talked down to.
3. If you're unwilling for your email to be read out to everyone in a large concert hall filled with all your friends and relatives and others don't send it. Because remember people have the ability to forward your email to their friends, who have their own friends... You see where this is going don't you?
4. Also remember when you’re talking face to face your features can soften much of what you say. Even when you're on the phone. You don't have that luxury by email and an email can be read as being nasty, bullying, aggressive and unfriendly simply because other people perceive what you've written differently to your intention and you're not there to explain
5. If your intention is to be aggressive and bad tempered. Don't do it. Remember email rage, like road rage can be over the most trivial things yet can alter two people's lives and relationship for ever.
6. Don't ever try and justify sending large amounts of email to prospect lists you've bought with no clue as to whether they are your target market. That's just spam. Spam is insulting, annoying and just adds up to the hassle factor for people you're sending it to. And of course in the USA is illegal.
7. Check your email before you send it and make sure you've added any attachments you wrote about.
8. Realise that if you do send attachments people fearing a virus may simply delete the email and nothing will get read.
9. Do not, I repeat do not, simply reply to an email and copy someone else on that reply. The reason is that you may have been having an email conversation that the new person shouldn't know about. I've received several over the years and have found the conversations interesting, and sometimes useful too!
10. Do not use an enormously long signature, or “Sig” at the end of your email. People are used to between 2 to 5 lines for a Sig. Anymore and they're just going to ignore it anyway but it can irritate people too.
... Finally Three Free Bonus Tips ...
11. Never send an email without a subject line. First, because it stands a great danger of being deleted. Second the person who receives it has no incentive to open it even though they have to find out what it's about. Why should they bother? Look at your subject line as the headline for your email. It should attract and intrigue so that the recipient wants to open it.
12. Because of Anti-spam filters you can't assume that your important business communication has got through. Certainly if people aren't expecting your email and haven't white-listed your address there is a strong risk of it going to a bulk email folder (where potential spam is sent). And hardly anyone checks that folder regularly.
13. Unlucky for some. Use the BCC field when you send an email to a lot of people. Otherwise every person you sent that email to sees everyone elses email addresses. If they're a competitor they may see one of your customer email addresses and ask for business and take your customers away from you.
Following these tips you stand more chance of your highly important and urgent email being read by the person you send it to.
10 Tips For Better Business Email - To learn more about this author, visit Jim Symcox's Website.
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