Five ways to make your emails more useful July 6th, 2007
Everyone is inundated with emails, most of which is junk, but some are useful to remind you to get something done, carry important work information or are integral to your business. When you send emails in return or are starting an email conversation with someone, here are five things to do with your emails to make them more useful.
FIRST write one email per subject. If you need to write to someone about several different subjects, write a new email for each subject. This enables the recipient to file each email into separate folders according to subject.
SECOND do not send more than one attachment per email. This allows the recipient to store or delete information according to subject once more.
THIRD write no more than 3 lines per paragraph. Paragraphs that are longer than 3 lines in length are not very easy to read. For a person to skim read your email you need to keep the number of lines down to 3 per paragraph.
FOURTH write any action you require as the last item in the email. If you ask for action in the middle of the email, your reader will have forgotten what action was required by the time she/he has read to the end. So place your requested action as the last thing in the email making it a far better hit rate that the reader will get into action immediately after reading the email.
FIFTH always reply to an email rather than starting a new email. For those of us who use email clients that store a threaded conversation, replying to the subject keep the email named by the original subject and thus will be stored together with all the other emails of the same name.
If you have any more ideas that could be added to this list you are quite welcome to list these in the comments area.