How to Become a Better Communicator through Email
Tips and Tactics
According to a study by McKinsey, we spend 28 percent of our workweeks reading, writing, or responding to email. So, if you take a typical 40-hour workweek where you spend eight hours a day on your job, that translates to 13 hours in an average workweek — it is still a whole lot to finish writing and answering emails.
So, now that we know why it’s important to write better emails let’s look into some tips to improve our communication through email.
∘ 1. Assigning tasks
∘ 2. Subject line
∘ 3. Keep Messages Clear and Brief1. Assigning tasks
Sometimes we receive emails where it is unclear what should be done and who is responsible. There were times when I made that mistake too. When I start the email with “All” and describe a problem, more so often, no one picks up that task. The best practice for that situation is using 3w’s.
Who —Name of the person to who you are assigning the task.
What — Description of the exact task you want someone to do.
When — Always Always provide a deadline as to when someone needs to complete the task.
2. Subject line
A newspaper headline has two functions: it grabs your attention, and it summarizes the article so that you can decide whether to read it or not. Similarly, your email subject line will often determine whether or not anyone will read your message. To make the email stand out, keep your subject line short, specific, and personalized.
- Always write a subject line
Having no subject line is worse than writing a bad subject line. An email with a blank subject line will likely get deleted and I believe no one should send an email without the subject line.
- Be clear and specific about the topic of the email
If the subject line is clear, it is obvious for the recipient what the email is about, and they can prioritize without having to open it.
- Place the most important words at the beginning
A typical desktop inbox displays about 60 characters of an email’s subject line, while mobile devices show just 25–30 characters, according to a post from Return Path. Also, studies show that a whopping 50% of emails are read on mobile phones.
Here is an example:
In this example you can see that the subject line displayed in mobile doesn’t give a clear idea of what this email is exactly referring to, the problem here is that important words are missing as they were placed at the end of the subject line. For the example, let’s see how we can fix it and make it work for both desktops as well as mobile.
In this example, we can see that even though the complete subject line is not displayed on the mobile phone but the important words are not missed so the reader will exactly know what this email entails.
A good subject line summarizes the topic of the email and helps with email retrieval in the future.
3. Keep Messages Clear and Brief
How do you create a responsive email? Here is the structure that helps to have some sort of visual hierarchy.
Short Paragraphs
Clean white space
Bullets
Get to the Signature
Even though it’s important to have short paragraphs, it might not be possible in every case. One best practice in such situations is TL;DR. It stands for Too Long, Didn’t read
TL;DR is a method where we add a short summary at the top of the long email. Although it takes time to concise the entire email into short summary, it is important to be respectful of reader’s time.
Lastly, be sure to proofread your emails, I have personally benefitted from this.
Tip: Online grammar/spell check tools will help improve accuracy.
