75% of adults use email daily… 25.2 billion business emails are exchanged daily. It could be the most powerful method of communicating and building relationships over the phone.
It has the immediacy of a conversation, but it totally lacks body language. Therein lies the potential for great misunderstanding and damage. Here are 20 tips for using email as a way to build or maintain relationships when you want to persuade or influence someone.
- Always start emails with “Hello”, “Hello”, whatever works for you, followed by a sentence or two of small talk. Exactly the same way you make a phone call.
- Correct. Bad handwriting is equivalent to someone speaking with spinach between their teeth. Listeners get distracted by spinach… readers get distracted by your typos.
- Never write in capital letters. This is considered YELLING! or SCREAMING!
- Always use a Subject line and make it meaningful. Then stay on topic. If you need to change the theme, please send a separate message.
- Always capitalize sentences and use punctuation with business acquaintances to build your relationship and credibility. (Family and friends are different: they won’t feel as insulted because you haven’t taken the time to properly communicate with them.)
- When replying, include only the minimum you need from the original message. Don’t just hit REPLY, especially when it’s an ongoing conversation and you have copies of the last 3-6 emails going back and forth.
- Send plain text: Forget bold or pretty colors, unless you’re familiar with the recipient’s technology. Older email systems can’t read them and you’ll look tacky.
- Never send unsolicited email to anyone, for any reason.
- Particularly in a situation of influence, always end emails with “Thank you”, “Sincerely”, “Regards”, whatever works for you. Write for them as you would like them to write for you.
- When sending the same email to a group, list all recipients’ email addresses in the BCC field if you don’t want other recipients to have the addresses. Email addresses are like phone numbers: you must have permission to post them.
- Don’t forward jokes (only newbies do this). Erase.
- Before sending large files (anything over 100,000 bytes), always zip/compress first and ask permission to send. Depending on your connection speed, some systems can take 30 minutes or more to open large files.
- Do not forward virus warnings. Newbies again. They are almost always hoaxes. Erase. Nevertheless, DO warn recipients if you know you have a virus that you may have transmitted.
- Never send emails with language that could be construed as vulgar, abusive, threatening or offensive comments based on race, religion or sexual orientation. Due to the lack of non-verbal cues, the recipient will take the words you type at face value. Use emoticons if you’re joking (there are websites online where you can find a list of these) so you can communicate your emotions without being insulting or hateful.
- Don’t be fooled by the “trolls”. Trollers send obviously offensive comments just to instigate a fight. Erase. If you are harassed or threatened, feel free to send a copy of the offending email to the sender’s ISP.
- Don’t be fooled by the “callers”. Treat them like she would road rage. Otherwise, calm drivers will swear or make obscene gestures when something goes wrong in traffic. Likewise, some people who wouldn’t dream of being rude to others at work don’t think to shoot a “flame” through email. If you respond with another flame, you could get caught in a flame war. If you must respond, fight the flames courteously. Never send anything you wouldn’t want to appear on the front page of the biggest newspaper in your city.
- Always use a “signature” if possible (a small block of text attached to the bottom of your messages, containing your contact information). Keep it short, 4-7 lines.
- Avoid requesting delivery receipts. This almost always annoys the recipient before they even read the message. Also, it usually doesn’t work due to the blocking functions. If you want to know, ask the recipient to let you know if they received it.
- Be careful with your address book. It’s easy to accidentally send a message to the wrong person. It could be embarrassing.
- Please remember that all emails can be archived and under certain circumstances may not be secure. All archived emails can be subpoenaed and made public by court order. E-mail sent at work belongs to the company (Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986) and 20% of US companies check employee mail randomly. Monitoring by the company is legal and you should have no expectation of privacy. If you have a private email address that is also used for business, don’t expect privacy there either.