Dr. E-Mail Wishes You A Happy New Year

E-Mails that are saved for reference to NOT belong in your Inbox. Create E-Mail folders for different references or sources and move these E-Mails to the relevant folder. The objective is to have no more than one page to scroll. If your in box is becoming bulkier by the day, you will soon find yourself lost in a sea of information and you will find it more difficult to prioritize what needs to get done.

Remember: Do not have more than one or two pages of E-Mails in your Inbox.

No Attachment is the Best Attachment!

Today's tip is regarding attachments that can be sent by E-Mail. The first rule is: No Attachment is the Best Attachment!

Attachments take time to download. The bigger the attachment, the longer it takes to download. If you mail a big attachment to many people, bandwidth could be clogged or wasted. They would also take up disk space on the recipient's computer.

Some E-Mail attachments may not be necessary. Consider faxing lengthy documents that might otherwise be E-Mailed. Or, if time is not really an issue, use regular mail services, UPS or Federal Express.

The Subject Line is your Message

The subject line is the most-read part of an E-Mail. Often, the E-Mail recipient decides whether to read your E-Mail or send it to trash based on the subject line. Not having a subject line or forgetting a subject line is even more of a guarantee that your E-Mail will not be read.

E-Mail marketing professionals live and die by subject lines. A good subject line will sum up what the message is all about, but still entice someone to open the message, read it, and take action. For E-Mail marketing, personalizing a subject line with your company’s name or the recipient’s name or other information can also lead to higher message open rates.

According to Jupiter Research, including the company name in the subject line can increase open rates by up to 32 percent to 60 percent over a subject line without branding.

E-Mail and Humor

E-Mail is a medium where communication is through words. This is just not the best medium to express emotions or use humor. The reason is because they don’t come across very well in an E-Mail. You may use emoticons to get over some of these shortcomings but there’s just no way to express tone, inflection, etc. Further, you will not be able to judge whether the recipient really understands that you are only joking. When you are having a conversation in person and happen to say something that the other person does not really appreciate, you can always say that you were only joking. This may not happen over E-Mail as never get to see the recipient's reaction, unless he or she writes back to say so. In that case, you can try and limit the damage already done.

So, the basic rule would be to avoid humor unless the recipient knows you well well enough to understand that you’re joking. It just is not worth the risk.

Anticipate

As email is a back-and-forth method of communicating, and it can take a day or more for a response (in some cases), you want to limit the number of times a message has to go back and forth. To do that, use “if … then” statements, anticipating the possible responses to your question.

By anticipating the possible responses, and giving a desired action for each possible response, you’re cutting a lot of wasted back-and-forth time.

One Screen Fits All!

Remember to keep the length of your E-Mail within one screen. Long, drawn out E-Mails can be cumbersome to your reader. They also could result in your E-Mail being on multiple screens. This would result in your reader having to scroll up to reread your message. Making it difficult for your reader to read your E-Mail is not effective E-Mail writing. Avoid long E-Mail messages. Avoiding long E-Mail messages is another way of stating that conciseness is important in effective E-Mail writing.

Email for Specific Audiences

Being aware of audience means taking a moment to think about the perspective of the person receiving the email - plus being focused on the purpose of the E-Mail. It helps to consider whether the message is being sent to a family member, a friend, a potential employer, or someone else encountered in the course of business. An E-Mail message to a family member or close friend usually does not require the same level of formality that would be used in a business setting.

If the person receiving the email appreciates brevity over formal grammar then it might be appropriate to abbreviate or add things like smileys. E-Mail sent as part of a business message should be brief and to the point, but should avoid abbreviations and grammar should be checked for obvious errors.