Email Etiquette
Email is one of the oldest forms of electronic communication, dating back to the seventies. It is a 30+ year old technology that has fundamentally never changed. Even in todays rich environment of HTML, plain text emails are still in the majority.
An email is the most important piece of communication you can have with someone. Visitors to your website come and go. They are faceless drones to you. An email to them is an opportunity to get to know and interact with them. The opportunity to win business can hinge on the success of an email.
We will take a look at what makes a good email, the do's and don'ts of email and the classic mistakes that people make when sending emails.
First Impressions
When receiving an email the first thing you usually see is the FROM and SUBJECT fields. Most email clients will present this information first, giving you the choice as to whether or not you should open up this email. It is akin to the envelope in traditional email. Therefore, this is the first time you have to 'sell' yourself. If your email is being read by someone that receives in hundreds of emails a day, you want to make sure yours does not get lost or passed over.
FROM field
The FROM field usually dictates who the email is from. An Internet email FROM field is allowed to have 2 fields; a name and an email address, usually formatted like:
"An. Other" <another@somewhere.com>
It is very common for people to forget to name themselves. This has the effect for the person reading the email, to see only the email address of the person it is from as oppose to their name.
Another classic gotcha, especially for small businesses/companies that have their own domain, is to have their email address to be different from their domain. For example someone that has, xyz.com should be using email addresses under their own domain name, as oppose to their ISP's domain. It creates a more professional, unified appearance.
SUBJECT field
It is very easy to become complacent with this. It is the most important part of an email. Remember to assume that the person reading your email knows nothing. Make the subject count and meaningful. Make it relate to the contents of the email and don't be over verbose. You aren't writing the whole email in the subject; just a title.
You can control which email address people send their replies to by setting the REPLY-TO field in your email client. This is a special field that will be used for any replies. It tells the email client, "use this address as oppose to the one in the FROM field please". It is particular useful for those that have fixed ISP accounts where a free-email address is forced.
Formatting your Email message
The email body is second most important aspect of your email. It is recommended that you do not send out HTML formatted emails unless you are absolutely sure the person reading it, can indeed process HTML emails. Not all clients can and even in this modern day, it is very common for people to turn it off as it increases the risk of email viruses. It is safe to send emails in PLAIN text format.
If you are sending your emails as PLAIN text, then it is a good practice to learn how to format without using the standard word-processing tricks of bolding etc. Layout your text in plane easy to read paragraphs. For example consider this example of a poorly formatted email:
Hi George,
Great to see you last night, had some real fun.
Hope you are going to be there
next week as i want to
see how you got on at the gym last night.
see ya later
Lilly
This email is all clumped up together. There is no paragraph breaks which makes the reading experience rather taxing. Break up your emails using blank lines to make it an easier read.
Remember, that the underlying email standard will break your lines into lengths of no more than 80 characters. Most will in actual fact break it at around 70 to allow for the fact when people reply back an extra character is added in.
While it is tempting to write your email as if you were writing a letter (Dear XXX, yours sincerely etc), it is very rarely done. Email is an informal medium and due to the fact it is such an instant medium, you generally don't waste either your time, and more importantly, their time, by reading and downloading 'fluff' that is not required. Let the email you generate be an expression of your own personality and not the pretend 'telephone' voice people tend to fall into.
Emotions in email
Writing is a difficult thing at the best of times. It is a skill. It is a skill to convey your message in a way that your readers will understand exactly what you meant and not misunderstand you which may result in them being offended with you. Email is no different and it is very easy to unintentionally upset your readers. What you may read as funny or humourous, may come over as a personal attack.
There are a number of classic gotcha's in email that you should be aware of.
DON'T SHOUT
Shouting at the best of times evokes an emotion. In an email if you write words or sentences in all UPPERCASE, then this is akin to shouting and therefore very offensive.
Use Smilies
A trend that many believe came from the recent mobile phone SMS revolution, was infact started from emails. Smilies is a method of using characters to display emotions. You read them by tilting your head to the left and looking at them as an 'image'.
:) a smile
:( a frown
;) a wink
:> very happy
There are literally thousands of them and when used at the end of a sentence can signal to the reader an emotion.
Emotion tags
Another trend that is starting to gain traction is emotion tags. This is where use < ... > tags to express an emotion. For example you would use an emotion tag in an email:
Hi George,
Did you catch the lecture yesterday <yawn>, man was it dull!
Lilly
Notice the use <yawn>. It gives the sentence some emotion, or 'facial' expression. There is no limit to what you can have inside tags, so use them when you wish to describe something that you know you would normally have used a facial expression or body language for.
For more information on emails check here: