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Benefits of business writing training courses:
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- improve overall business communication
Business Writing Training: How to Make Your Emails More Effective
Email is now the most common form of written communication, and by a big margin, and yet we're all expected to know how to use it without any sort of training. Even in schools today its glossed over, and when most of us went to school email didn't even exist.
In this article I'm going to give you some tips on how to write better business emails, and in Part 2 I'll be telling you how to make yourself a high-value email sender in the eyes of others, and how to get people to take the actions you ask them to in your emails. Some of these rules can apply to social email too, but I'll leave that for another time.
The first problem you have with any email is this:
Digital information is regarded as low value
Digital information is widely perceived as having very low cash value, and this tends to cause a low perception of its overall value. Think of the value of 24 photo's you got back from the processors versus 150 digital ones on a memory card, or the value of a single bought from the record shop versus a downloaded track, and of a magazine cover disks stuffed with free software. Now think of the value of a handwritten letter versus the value of an email - doesn't begin to compare. The first thing to realise is that's the environment you're working in when you send email.
Now, here are some basic tools to improve your email communication.
Keep it short
If you're choosing a novel, you won't be put off by it being 200 pages long, or maybe even 500 - and some people happily tackle a novel by Dostoyevsky.
The same is certainly not true of email. Email is generally unsolicited and its essential to catch the readers attention quickly. A long email is an immediate turn-off because its clear from the outset that considerable time and effort is called for from the reader, and with no guarantee that this will prove worthwhile.
To put it simply, the shorter your email is the more chance it has of being read. If all you really want to do is get a simple point across and you can do it in one sentence, then do it. Padding it out to make it look longer is a tactic you might have used for school essays, but its completely wrong for email. Always aim to keep your mail below 5 lines.
Break up your emails
If you have a body of information to get out to your audience, it doesn't all have to go in one email, you can break it up and send, say, one instalment per week. For instance, I was involved with pensions department who planned to send out information to members on their investment options. The email the last time they did this was 1500 words, and they got no response, and no members exercised their option to manage their own investment funds. I got them to send out this email 'Did you know you can manage the investment of your pension fund yourself? If you'd like to know more call your pension team on......'. They got a steady stream of interest for a week.
Use 11 or 12 point font
If you use a small font, its just a bit extra effort for the reader, and you should always be making your reader's job as easy as you can. On the other hand, if you use a big font, readers tend to feel your trying to bully them and they don't like it. In any case, big text isn't a natural read and people don't find it comfortable to read
The danger of highlighting
To address the above you may be tempted to highlight some words or sentences. The risk you run is that these are the only parts that get read. If these are the only parts you want your reader to see, why did you write the rest?
Unless you're a really clever user who wants evidence that they sent information, but don't really want you to read it, so they really want to have only the highlighted part read. Mischievous.
Be aware of the onward audience
An email can easily be forwarded to someone else, and as we know people don't always read emails in full (or at all) but that doesn't stop them being forwarded. You can't rely on your recipients to be sensible about who they copy in, because its your reputation that's at stake. You might be targeting at a friend, and the message ends up with your manager. You might be targeting the manager, and it ends up with his staff. So don't send email you wouldn't want read by a wider audience.
Don't type all in capitals
Most people know this one already, but sadly not all. Typing all in capitals IS CALLED SHOUTING. The reason its so offensive is that the message you're giving to your reader is that they are so low value to you couldn't even be bothered to turn off the caps lock before typing them a message. This subconscious message you're sending to your reader is far more powerful than whatever message you were trying to get across with the words you typed. Its rather like the difference of body language vs spoken language, literally the difference between speaking to someone and shouting at them.
It's not a text, you can type out words in full
Writing out a text on a mobile phone is fairly hard work, and its become common practice to miss letters and abbreviate pretty ruthlessly. When you write an email you normally have a full qwerty keyboard at your command. Your readers are valuable, respect them. If you make your reader feel low value, he'll assume you regard the communication as low value. There's always that big X button at the top of the screen, and its so easy to press.
When replying - keep the title relevant
People often reply to an email and raise different issues to those mentioned in the first message. After a few mailings, the subject matter discussed can quite different to the message title, which can make it difficult to find information later. There's nothing from stopping you changing the title before sending on.
Sending to the right person - beware David Jones or Mark Smith
Sending your emails to the wrong person, just because they share a name with your intended recipient, can be quite annoying for that person particularly if it happens more than once. This then has the risk for you that they simply delete the mail and leave you not knowing that it was never delivered.
MS Outlook is very helpful and will auto-populate the recipient's name after you type the first few letters. It will do this even if you sent to the wrong person last time, helping you to make the same mistake over and over again.
In the last company I worked for, there were 11 David Jones's and 8 Mark Smith's. In China you need to tread carefully with Wei Wang because there'll be plenty of those.
Reply at the top, not at the bottom
Some email programmes are set to a default which puts your reply below the message you received. Worse still, they can be set to start a new message and not show the original sender's text at all.
People expect to see the new text at the top of an email, and previous text further down. If your text is at the bottom, it may well not be seen at all.
Both of these things are symptoms of settings on your email programme, rather than a poor choice personally made by the writer - but that makes no difference to your poor reader.
Escalating Arguments
Written communication lacks the body language of verbal communication, and things that might be acceptable to say face to face can look harsh in writing. In social emails body language is substituted by smileys and this goes some way to addressing the problem. However, smileys haven't become the accepted norm for business email, so you need to operate without this safety net.
People are more comfortable escalating an argument in writing than they would be person to person, but its counter productive and best avoided. There are three great ways to avoid increasingly angry exchanges;
1. Don't reply right away, wait a while. If you write a response, save it and re-read the next day before sending
2. Don't reply by email at all, phone the person or go and speak to them.
3. If you must reply, make sure you stay calm and don't add disturbance to troubled waters.
The Key Message
If you want someone to read your email, you must treat them with respect. If they can see you put care into your communication, and made it easy to read, they will feel that you value them and there's a far higher chance they'll read your work.
Source: Colne Brooks link
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