Work On Your Email Etiquette

Hi everyone! Today I am going to talk about another topic that we encounter every day…email! Now that your social media is cleaned up, you can now learn to clean up some email etiquette. Emailing can be hard especially when trying to thank someone without sounding overly excited or sending the perfect apology. Below are the 10 golden rules for crafting the best email.

 

Keep in mind, communication can vary depending on the industry, your relationship with the recipient, etc.

 

  • Clear subject line: for the subject line, get to the point. If the email is urgent, express that in the subject line but use it sparingly.
  • Use a greeting: depending on your relationship with the recipient, use a greeting. If you do not know the recipient, you should be more formal with your greeting. You should also quickly introduce yourself. Lastly, if you are emailing back and forth in a chain, you don’t need to continually use a greeting. Similar to the golf etiquette blog, follow the lead of the people you are talking to.
  • Use shorthand when applicable: if you are emailing back and forth with your team and have acronyms for certain projects, you can use them. If there are people outside the team, this can make them feel out of place so try to adjust based on who the group is.
  • State the purpose of your email: no one wants to read emails that drag on and on for paragraphs. If you need action by a specific date, make sure to lead with that. Open-ended emails can be confusing.
  • Emojis can be over-powering: it is easy to throw a smiley face emoji into every emoji to lighten up the tone. Tone across emails can be difficult, but you want to be careful over-doing the emoji.
  • Check who you’re sending to: do you want to reply to everyone or just who sent the email? Are you sending your email to the right Amy? Especially with private information, it is very important to double-check your recipients.
  • Spell check: Grammarly is your best friend! When you are looking over who you are sending to, be sure to check your grammar and spelling. There is nothing worse than sending an email to your boss, just to realize a big spelling error when you hit send.
  • Respond to emails in a timely manner: this is very important for daily tasks. It is easy to forget when your inbox is overflowing with emails, but if you get your responses out of the way, this leaves more time to focus on your work.

 

I hope this acts as a reminder to keep up your email etiquette. Have a great weekend and hopefully take some time away from your email inbox!

 

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