How to Effectively Use Email at Work

Chen Weixiang @ May 07, 2017 | TAG: Methodology

This article introduce that how to effectively use Email at work.

How to Write Email

Good email etiquette at work significantly improves our overall work efficiency.

Email Body

No matter whether it’s an internal email to your best friend co-worker or a message full of important information to a client, you should always get in the habit of addressing them by first name, or Mr./Mrs. So-and-so. A good rule of thumb, address this person as you would address them in conversation.

To use email at work successfully, you need to keep email messages brief and to the point:

Use Bullet Points if you do have much to write:
- Break your message into bullet points.
- Begin each point with a concise summary of the action you want to be taken.
- Make sure important information is not hidden in your message’s or any bullet point’s meat.
One Action per Message. Do not lump together anything you need or want to tell a recipient into one message. In particular:
- Start a new message for each major action you request from the recipient. This makes it easier for the recipient to get their email handled and the necessary actions completed.

Quoting proper text of the original message in a reply when it is really needed. And make the quoted text in proper indentation, or different background color, or different font color or size, to let recipients easier to read. And do not make any changes to the quoted text.

Keep it focused on business: Work emails are not for office gossip or sharing your entire life story with others. It’s not OK to fill an email with useless details which make the relevant business information hard to find. Do not talk private things via company email.

Do not use too many abbreviates in your email: Not everybody knows every acronym, and these abbreviations do not save that much time anyway. So, use only very few acronyms, and possibly only if you can be sure the recipient knows their meaning, such as, ASAP (As Soon As Possible), FYI (For Your Information).

Do not use exclamation point (!) in your email: Do not use exclamation point (!) in your email even only one because you just need to write down some facts in your email, not judge some facts in court. Also be careful with irony in Emails.

Leave out the emoticons, jargon or slang: Keep it professional, leave out the emoticons, such as :), :(, 4 u (instead of for you).

Be careful with confidential information: Refrain from discussing confidential information in emails, such as someone’s tax information or the particulars of a highly-sensitive business deal. Should the e-mail get into the wrong person’s hands, you could face serious - even legal - repercussions.

Do not writing in all caps: When you write in all capital letters, it looks to most recipients as if you were shouting. You should use all caps sparingly. It is a strong effect, and it should remain one. Text in all upper case is significantly more difficult to read than lower and mixed case text. It’s best to write online in sentence case or mixed case, with the first letter of the first word of a sentence and proper nouns capitalized. That is how people are used to reading printed material.

Resize pictures to handy proportions before inserting them in Emails, or insert the shrunken image in your message.

Catch typos by enabling spelling checker of your mail client.

Email Attachments

Attach files to your email only when it is really necessary: Nobody likes to wait for a long download, and often this costs the recipient of large email attachments not only time but also money. And many email accounts place limits on the size of files they accept.

Instead of sending files via email, you can:

use file sending service rather than attach them directly.
compress files before sending them via email and rename the compressed file to proper name.

Email Signature

Make sure you create a signature for your messages that includes your title, department, and important contact information.

The signature is separated from the body of the email by a specific string of characters called the email signature delimiter. Most email programs and services use the signature delimiter to identify where the body of the email ends and the signature begins, then use the information to visually separate the signature from the rest of the email. The standard signature delimiter that is widely used on Usenet, but also with email, is -- (two dashes followed by a white-space character) on a line by itself.

Do not use email signatures like sent from my iPhone, please excuse any typos or sent with my thumbs when you sending email via mobile phones.

But I prefer to use the following short one in my private email:

--
Best regards,
Weixiang Chen

Email Subject

Including a clear, direct subject line is necessary because people often decide whether to open an email based on the subject line.

In the subject, you should summarize the message - why you are writing and what you want to be different after the recipient has read your email - instead of describing it. Choose one that lets readers know you are addressing their concerns or business issues.

Email subjects need to be concise. Skip articles, adjectives, and adverbs.

If the action associated with your message includes a date or deadline, do include it in the email subject.

Use title case in subject: The First Letter of Most Words Is Capitalized in Title Case.

Examples of a good subject line include Meeting date changed, Quick question about your presentation, or Suggestions for the proposal.

To, Cc and Bcc

Add the email address last because you don’t want to send an email accidentally before you have finished writing and proofing the message.

Double-check that you’ve selected the correct recipient. Please pay careful attention when typing a name from your address book on the email’s To line. It’s easy to select the wrong name, which can be embarrassing to you and to the person who receives the email by mistake.

It’s necessary to distinguish the Reply All and Reply. Do not use Reply to All when:

only the original sender needs to know your reply.
your comments will be crucial to know for the original sender and a few other recipients. In this case, use Reply and add the select other recipients manually. You can copy their addresses from the original email, of course.
you have been a Bcc: recipient in the original message.
your message says Thanks or Me too. It’s not recommended to just reply only one word because it is not enough content and too much annoyance.

How to Reply Email

After reading a professional email, allow time for your mind to completely digest the email and come up with good responses.

In answering business emails, pay careful attention to the tone in your emails. This is normally reflected in the words you use to express yourself.

Be clear and direct in your email replies, and avoid being ambiguous. That means, you should know what you want to say; and say it with the shortest possible words.

Make your replies one-to-one. That means you should take the responsibility for your email replies and speak directly to the reader. From every email, you should be able to deduce some useful tips in deciding the best way to frame your reply. For example, you should know:

What will make the reader of your email respond favourably
What is of interest to him or her
What is his or her perspective on the issue at hand

Keep it Short, Simple and Sweet (KISSS). Be careful of the length of your email replies; they determine if they will be read or not. This is an old principle of writing that still holds true in writing email replies.

How to Forward Email

Forwarding emails is a great way of sharing ideas. Good ideas will hopefully be shared a lot.

If you are at the end of such a sharing chain, you’ll quickly see why cleaning up emails before forwarding them is essential: messages that have been forwarded multiple times often contain > and other quotation characters in all the wrong places, lines are broken in even worse places, and email addresses of people you don’t want to know are everywhere.

Cleaning up such a mess can be cumbersome, but keeping an email clean that you forward initially is easy.

First, make sure you’re sharing the email, not the addresses in it by removing all addresses from the forwarded message. Of course, there are exceptions. In particular, when the list of who participated in a discussion is an important part of the information you are forwarding, it makes no sense to remove the addresses.
Then, clean up the message itself if it contains unnecessary > characters or messed up line breaks. Email cleanup utilities can do this nasty work for you.
Place any comments you have after or (preferably) before the forwarded message, but try to avoid mixing forwarded text and comments.

To forward emails and links in a way that shares relevant information and fosters ties, spell out, at the email’s top, why you think the recipient will find interesting what you share.

Checkpoint

Always check before clicking send: One of the worst feelings is clicking send and realizing you missed something, didn’t attach a document, or misspelled something. Rule of thumb is not to include the email address in the send line until you’ve proofed.
Keep your Inbox clean and Check your Email on YOUR time: Meaning don’t get caught checking your email every few minutes. One of the biggest momentum killers is getting in the habit of checking your email frequently, pausing what you may be doing, thus making you reset your focus. Reply to any email in less than 48 hours and ideally, in less than 24 hours (weekends do not count). This kind of email expediency will be greatly appreciated by colleagues, clients and collaborators.
Use an auto-responder: When you are away from the office for more than 2 days, with the exception of weekends, set an auto-responder to automatically reply to all emails, letting people know you are away and you have limited or no access to email (if this is the case). Also, leave them your phone number or the email of another colleague for emergencies.