e-skills UK Guide

Email best practice

Email good practice

Most small business owners would agree that email is a really useful business tool, if used correctly. If used incorrectly it has the power to upset and offend customers, suppliers and members of your staff. Therefore we need to be careful what and how we say things using email. Indeed, we may find that in some circumstances email is not the right way to communicate certain messages.

When to use email

Take time to compose important emails. Email allows you to respond quickly to people you deal with and your desire to be responsive might tempt you to dash a note without giving it enough thought.

Before sending important emails, read them through carefully to ensure you have been accurate and your email conveys what you want to say. Consider asking someone else to read it before you send it.

Remember that your recipient is likely to have a ‘forward’ button just like you do. It is probably easier for your recipient to forward your message than it is to copy and pass on a letter. You should not use emails to express confidences that you don’t want to be passed on - especially observations on other people.

Consider alternatives to email such as the telephone or instant messaging. In some cases you may need to wait a few days to get a response to an email where as a telephone conversation is instant. 

For more details on using instant messaging take a look the online discussions guide.

How to style an email message

You do not need to ‘top and tail’ messages with ‘Dear...’ and ‘Yours…’. That is uncommon in emails. In general you should keep emails brief and to the point avoiding flowery language. Curtness can, however, come across as rudeness. Use complete sentences and observe the usual punctuation and capitalisation rules.

The exception to this guideline is that you should consider following the sender’s style when replying. For example, if you get a message like this:

Dear Andy,
Can we meet to discuss your proposal? I am free Tuesday next week.
Regards,
Tony

Consider replying in a similar vein:

Dear Tony,
I’d be very pleased to meet up with you. Tuesday at 9am is fine with me.
Regards,
Andy

How to compose an email message

Recipients cannot see your expression or hear your voice intonation when they get your email. The nature of emails lends them to humour, and this is fine but, when looked at coldly, your message can appear rude or offensive. To overcome this problem, people have devised a number of ‘Emoticons’ to try to convey expression. The ‘smiley’ :-) is a common example. As a rule of thumb, though, avoid humour and emoticons unless you know your recipient will appreciate them.

Avoid sarcasm altogether. Your recipient might misunderstand it, and the result can be devastating.

Every email message you send has a subject line that you should use. Bear in mind that your recipient may receive many emails. Without a useful subject line your message might get buried or, worse, might be deleted without being read. A relevant subject line will help your recipient of your email to identify the email as a valid email. In addition it will help you to find a copy of your email if you need it later on.

A common problem is subject ‘drift’. You send someone an email with a relevant subject. They reply using their ‘reply’ button, which automatically puts your original subject in their reply. After a few exchanges, the subject line remains the same but the content of the notes has moved on to something completely different. When replying to an email, check the subject line to see if it is still relevant.

Build the context of your message

Your recipient might receive many emails each day. It is possible they might not remember the context of your message. You should therefore use one or more of the following techniques to set the context of your message:

1. Use a relevant subject line (see previous section).
2. Use an introductory paragraph; perhaps something like “Following our meeting this morning, I agreed to send you…”.
3. If you are replying to a message, include text from the message you are replying to in your own message.

Email tips

Avoid ‘all capitals’
In general, it is good practice to avoid using ALL CAPITALS, which are the written equivalent of shouting. Some people on the internet get VERY UPSET when they see capitals in emails and forums, so be careful when you use them!

Avoid £, $ and other national symbols

Currency symbols are implemented in different ways in different countries. A ‘£’ in a message sent from the UK can be substituted by a ‘$’ if it is routed through the US, for example. Your recipient might be pleased or dismayed depending on the rates of conversion! In this case using GBP or USD should clarify the message.

Use ‘urgent’ sparingly

Your email software will have an option to mark your email as urgent. Using an urgent flag might - or might not - speed up delivery of your message. It will be marked as urgent in your recipient’s in-tray so it might get read more quickly.

You can obviously overplay this card and you should use the urgent flag only when there is a clear reason for urgency, otherwise you risk a really urgent message being overlooked. If you require an answer within a specific time frame consider using the telephone or instant messaging.

Remember – urgent for you may be a lot less urgent for the recipient.

Use spell checking

Spelling errors in email are usually tolerated, but a spell checker might help you present a stronger image to the people you deal with. You should be able to configure your email software to check the spelling of your emails automatically.

Sending attachments

One powerful feature of any email system is its ability to send attachments. An attachment can be anything that can be stored as a computer file. You can send multiple attachments with a single email. There are, however, some important issues to bear in mind if you want to use attachments effectively:

• A common mistake is to write a covering email and then forget to send the attachment itself. If you intend to send an attachment, get into the habit of inserting it into your email first (while you are thinking about it) rather than waiting until the end.
• Be careful when using large attachments. This is because some email systems reject large attachments and so the attachment will not get through to your recipient.
• If your recipient uses a slow speed connection to pick up email, large attachments can take hours to download and will be very annoying to the recipient. As a result your recipient may delete the email before they have even read it.

Avoid Printing Emails

Consider the wasted paper if we all printed our emails rather than read them on screen. If at all possible deal with all of your emails “on screen” and only print those that are especially important or need to be annotated by hand.