Professional E-mail Tips

From Illi​nois​.Edu

I have done sev­eral arti­cles on how to man­age email, focus­ing on orga­ni­za­tion and get­ting things done. This arti­cle by Keith Robin­son focuses on mak­ing sure that emails sent out are pro­fes­sion­ally done. I’m sure many of you do this already and many things here are com­mon sense.

But it’s still good to have all these writ­ten down.

Read on and learn!

Pro­fes­sional E-mail Tips
By Keith Robinson,11:00 AM on Thu Sep 15 2005

E-mail is some­thing that is so easy it’s hard. I’m amazed at the poor qual­ity of e-mail that comes my way.

How you han­dle e-mail says some­thing about how you are pro­fes­sion­ally. An error-filled mes­sage or untimely response can show that you don’t take pride in what you do. Yet I see these things every day.

I’m no mas­ter when it comes to e-mail, but I think I do pretty well. If noth­ing else, I’ve got a good idea what not to do. If you’re like me, you’ve got so much e-mail com­ing through every day that it’s damn near impos­si­ble to be per­fect with all of it. It’s clear that most of us could do a bit bet­ter with e-mail.

Many peo­ple strug­gle with e-mail, so, if you work on it a bit, you could really stand out. On that note, I thought I’d take a lit­tle time and out­line some pro­fes­sional e-mail tips.

Spell-check. This may sound funny com­ing from a blog­ger who has a prob­lem with typos, but I assure you I do my very best to check and dou­ble check my e-mails for spelling and gram­mar errors. There are times I let one slip and I almost always find it down the road and I’m totally embarrassed.

You’d think that peo­ple com­mu­ni­cat­ing pro­fes­sion­ally would do a great job of catch­ing typos and spelling errors. In my expe­ri­ence, you’d be wrong. I’ve had e-mails from lawyers, CEOs, tech­ni­cal direc­tors, accoun­tants, bookkeepers—you name it—with some really silly, easy to find and fix, errors. I shake my head every time.

Most e-mail appli­ca­tions have spell-check of some sort, and if you use an online ser­vice with Fire­fox you can install the Spell­bound exten­sion. For those who use Thun­der­bird, you’ve got a plu­gin as well.

Respond to your e-mail in a timely fash­ion. Noth­ing screams “unpro­fes­sional” more than an extremely slow response to legit­i­mate e-mail. Ok, no response at all is worse, and not as uncom­mon as you might expect, but it’s bad busi­ness either way. I know as well as any­one how hard it can be to get to and answer every­thing that comes in. And I also know that no mat­ter how hard you try a few are going to slip through the cracks.

I’m not try­ing to say you need to respond to every unso­licited e-mail that comes in. I don’t try to do that either. I’d spend all day doing e-mail if I did. How­ever, when it’s impor­tant, or on a topic that needs a response, it looks really bad if you don’t respond quickly.

I take the time to do my very best to not only respond to most of my e-mail, but to do so as quickly and as com­pletely as I can. Many peo­ple have expressed their amaze­ment and grat­i­tude, which makes me feel like I’m doing the right thing. As well, I know how mad it makes me when peo­ple don’t respond to me. There are too many times I’ve got to send 2, or more often 3, reminders before I get a response. Each time I do that my view of the person’s pro­fes­sion­al­ism drops.

Even a sim­ple, “I’ve received your e-mail but I’m a bit snowed under right now, is it ok if I get back to you in a week or so?” is alright, as long as it’s actu­ally fol­lowed up on. For when you’re on vaca­tion, or not able to respond to e-mail, it’s good to set up an auto respon­der. It might not be per­sonal, but at least you’ll let peo­ple know why you’re not get­ting back to them.

For dig­ging out from under too much e-mail, I wrote up some tips you can use. These were very help­ful to me com­ing back from my last vaca­tion. You might also give Michael Hyatt’s Auto­mated E-mail Fol­lowup a read.

Make sure your e-mail is (mostly) rel­e­vant. We all get too much e-mail. Keep your mes­sages on topic. A lit­tle aside ask­ing how a person’s day is going is fine, but don’t try to mix too many top­ics into one e-mail.

Be con­cise yet com­plete. Keep it short as pos­si­ble while mak­ing sure you’ve included all the rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion. If you ram­ble you might lose the reader and I don’t know how many times I’ve received an e-mail that was miss­ing some cru­cial bit of infor­ma­tion that caused me to e-mail back and ask for it. That doesn’t look too good. ;0)

A quick edit of your e-mail can help with this. Re-read your mes­sage, ask your­self if it says what you need to say and see if any­thing can be removed. It doesn’t have to be a dif­fi­cult or lengthy process, just a quick once over before you hit “send”.

Sign your e-mail. At the very least your name if the per­son you’re e-mailing doesn’t know you well. I get many e-mails from peo­ple whose e-mail address is funky, some­thing like purplebeast543@something.com, and it makes for an awk­ward response if I don’t know their name.

For most business-related e-mail, it’s a good idea to include a sig­na­ture that iden­ti­fies you by name, title and who your work­ing for. At least one way to con­tact you is impor­tant as well.

Make your e-mails per­sonal. You’ll want to make the per­son you’re talk­ing with feel impor­tant and that you’re atten­tion, as far as this e-mail goes, is about them.

Call them by name. Be friendly, yet business-like. Don’t use cookie cut­ter word­ing and what­ever you do, don’t cut and paste from another e-mail.

Keep it clean. And by clean I mean nicely for­mated and clutter-free. There can be a temp­ta­tion to over-design your e-mails. Espe­cially when it comes to a sig­na­ture block. This is ok as long as it doesn’t go over­board with col­or­ful back­grounds or clash­ing fonts. Make sure the for­mat is one that is easy on the eye and easy to read.

When in doubt, avoid spe­cial for­mat­ting altogether.

The bet­ter you know some­one, the less you need to worry about some of this stuff. I think one of the rea­sons peo­ple have prob­lems with e-mail is a sim­ple lack of time. So, when you’re con­vers­ing with a busi­ness asso­ciate that you know pretty well, you can let some things slide. For exam­ple; your typos might be less evi­dent and you can prob­a­bly forgo the sig­na­ture once they’re used to get­ting e-mails from you.

Most of these tips are more impor­tant for peo­ple you have a for­mal rela­tion­ship with and I know that when doing busi­ness over the Web (via e-mail) you can switch to a casual busi­ness rela­tion­ship really quick. Which is great. It fos­ters more open com­mu­ni­ca­tion and takes less time. Just remem­ber that these things can still help, and don’t let every­thing slide.