Writing Email That Gets Answered

Golly heck, lots of comments….

I see mentions of being respectful and not rude etc with email. I’m sure many folks tend to use email to send a thank you note, but I still firmly believe that a hand-written, well crafted thank you on a card that has a personal image on the front (with perhaps some smiley faces or shiny gold starts sprinkled inside), will BLOW SOMEONE”S SOCKS OFF in comparison to an email. It’s worth the effort.

Great post, Chris – see you at PODCAMP 3…

Yours with boundless enthusiasm,

Richard :)
Chief Deal Weaver
http://www.BlackWidowNetwork.com

Fantastic post, Chris! Great pointers.

I’d also love to add, Don’t Forward Junk! I have a couple of people on my list I’ve considered blocking because despite a polite reminder from time to time they still keep sending me those viral soppy mails. Now days I’ve taken to foldering EVERYTHING by those people and get around to it, usually deleting without even reading a bunch of their stuff, when I’m ready.

@Erika: You mentioned deleting parts of a threaded conversation with Gmail? How do you do that? I’d love to clean up some of the ramble amongst my gmail messages but I haven’t figured out how to break messages up so I can remove one of the thread and not the entire thing.

I try to keep all emails short and to the point and well organized. If there’s more than one point to make then I use numbered lists. If I’m getting especially long emails in return, I explain how hampering this is to actually responding.

If someone wants to write a 2 page email asking me for something, that’s fine, as long as they realize that my response isn’t going to be as long. I want to exchange the information NEEDED and then get on with my day.

Great advice for email writers. I can see a couple of changes I can make myself to make things easier on people that I respond to or email. Thanks!

How do you handle the problem that email is no longer 100% reliable? Having used several different companies now, with all of them, sometimes emails just disappear into the ether. (And they all say they’ve never heard of this problem or that there’s no way to figure out what’s going on.)
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Have we thought about how we answer?
I love the site I found through lifehacker:
five sentences.

Maybe we should bear that in mind, too.

Re: signatures:

I never add a link to my blog, as links in emails sometimes cause emails to into that client’s spam filter.

Chris,

As everyone else has pointed out, this was a great article and very useful. I have occasionally had to write longer e-mails for business purposes, mainly to recap a meeting, but generally keep them short. And as someone who used to get hundreds of e-mails a day, many of which I was just cc’d on, relevant subjects are vital.

To answer your other question, as to how improve the state of your in-box, I have two suggestions:
1. Get to the bottom of your in-box daily,
2. and file, file, file.

I love folders and use them often, both for “follow-up” purposes and for record-keeping.

Regarding emails, I start off with a sentence setting the tone of what action I need done. Then I explain the issue. To close, I restate the necessary action item.

As for my signature line, I like to use the following:
Name
Title
My Specialties
Email / Phone
Connect with me online [custom url]

That url displays a list of links to my profiles on Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. and keeps my signature short and simple.

Intersting topic Chris. From a corporate perspective, I occasionally add some of our RSS feeds in the signature as my emails go to customers and reporters. This way, they can subscribe if they are interested in receiving updates (releases, recent news coverage, and case studies). However, I have to be careful as this can seem like spamming.

What do you think about the inclusion of RSS feeds when appropriate?

Great post Chris. One thing that really helps me out a lot in going through email is an appropriate subject line that makes a call to action or describes the type of email quickly. For example, “please call regarding _____” or “FYI: _______” or “Introducing ______ by way of _____ .” Also, if you need to write me an email that is only a few words, put it all in the subject line and type EOM (end of message) at the end. That way I don’t even have to open the email to read ten words.

I think that sums it up pretty well Chris, and some of these are fantastic comments!! If only they would come up with an email summarizer to make the thousands of emails easier to go through. Four hundred plus emails a day gets soooo old…………

I have a question – what do you say about sending an e-mail to say thank you when someone has answered your e-mail. I get umpteen thank you e-mails when I have completed a task asked of me in an e-mail. We have 500 people in our building and if everyone sends thank yous to everything that gets answered, what will happen to the server?

Think about choosing to go out to eat: if the first message is, “what day is good for you?”, the second message is, “what type of food do you like?”, and the third message is, “should we invite Jay, even though he laughs a lot and makes it hard to concentrate?”, you’ll see my point. These three questions all have a certain level of decision making to them. The mail on which day (better solved by a phone call) is different from the mail on what type of food, and both are different than whether or not to invite Jay (also probably better solved by a phone call).