With so many professionals primarily working from home with the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic, effective email communication with your work colleagues has never been as important.
It’s not like you can mosey on over to your co-worker’s desk to ensure you are being clear.
Do not underestimate the loss of face-to-face communications. The subtle body language and facial expressions we take for granted have largely evaporated during the stay-at-home era.
4 Tips To Ensure Your Work Emails Are Effective
These four tips can help you communicate clearly via email.
1. Email Subject Lines
People prioritize what emails they read first by who is sending the email (you’re going to read emails from your boss right away) and second by what the subject line says.
Give some consideration to how the recipient will react to your subject line.
Email subject lines have one purpose and one purpose only: To persuade the recipient to open the email.
So ask yourself: What is in it for them to open your email over others that may be equally pressing? What will compel the recipient to open that email?
Use what you know about the recipient to entice them to open.
2) Email Brevity
Keep your emails as short as possible.
It has always been the case that people are inundated with messages from all directions and the pandemic has only increased the flood of email messages.
People tend to scan rather than read what is before them when reading on screens. Keeping your communications to the absolute minimum will help ensure your message is understood.
Some emails need to be lengthy in order to explain complex topics. If that’s the case, break up the text into smaller chunks by keeping paragraphs to two sentences and using headlines, sub-heads, and bullet points whenever possible.
The idea is to make the email appear less daunting to read. Huge chunks of text simply look exhausting.
3) Use Bold In Emails
Use bold to call out key concepts in your email to help people who scan understand your message.
Pro Tip: After you’ve bolded key concepts, read only the bold parts to see if someone reading just those phrases will understand your email.
4) Assigning Tasks In Emails
If you are asking someone to execute a task, try and keep your emails focused on only one task at a time.
If you must ask people to do more than one task in a single email, be sure to number them and limit the tasks to three.
What are your email writing tips? Let me know what I’m missing in the comments.
The e-Strategy Academy covers all aspects of digital marketing including search optimization & marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, video marketing, mobile marketing & public relations.