10 Best Tips to Write Effective Emails

Nowadays, we communicate more and more through email. We use Email communication to write something to friends, relatives, colleagues or clients. Whoever the recipient of your email, it is becoming very important that you write email effectively. As you know, by writing effective email, you can save your time, other person’s time and you can win more trust & confidence from the other end.

Reply to Email As soon as Possible

More and more people contact each other through email. Even if they mention directly or not, they expect prompt responses. One of the study by Jupiter Research indicates that 35% of customers expect a reply within six hours, an additional 55% expect a response within 24 hours. Though many people focus on response time, content is just as important. The same study indicated that lack of a thorough response (45%) will cause on-line customers to view a company negatively when considering future purchases.

Learn the art of writing Email

Poorly crafted emails will generate additional emails back & forth, which potentially eating up more of your time. Worse, they can drive unnecessary calls to your most costly channel - your phone. And at that point, customers are bound to be angry and frustrated.

Here are some tips for writing email responses that are both thorough and appropriate:

1. Format your response so that it’s easy to read on a screen. Do not write email using very long sentences, which are lengthy horizontally. Each line must be short. Ideally, write 5-6 words in each line only and not more than that.

2. Make sure the subject line is concise and meaningful to the recipient…not just a generic
“Response from Marketing Team” But also be careful that it doesn’t look like spam.

3. Have one subject per paragraph. Mention this separately by blank lines, so that its easy to read and understand.

4. Be brief. Use as few words as possible to convey your message. More is not better when
it comes to email. An email is not perceived as an electronic letter.

5. Use simple, declarative sentences. Write for a third or fourth grade audience,
particularly if you’re creating templates that are sent automatically. You do not know the
education level of your sender or the sender’s level of comfort with the English language.

6. Be sensitive to the tone of the original email. If the sender is upset because of an error on
your part, acknowledge the error. Clearly state what you are doing to correct the situation.

7. Make sure you answer all the questions posed in the original inquiry. A partial answer
frustrates the sender and results in additional contacts. It also makes the company sending
the response look inept.

8. Make it clear what actions you will be taking next and when the writer can expect the
next contact from you.


9. Don’t ask for an order number/case number or any old information which you remember out of your mind only when one is included in the original email…sounds pretty basic, but sometimes people miss very obvious info in email.

10. Don’t just tell the sender to go to your web site. In many cases, they have already been to
the web site and couldn’t find the answers they were looking for. If you want them to go
back to the web site, provide a direct link to the exact information the reader needs.

Art Stanley, January 2008

Source: http://www.redpepperpublishing.com

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