- Make your subject line meaningful; and
- Put your main point in the first paragraph and use bullet points and short paragraphs to make your email easy to read.
This time I want to share a few more business email tips with you.
- When you are writing professional emails, make sure you are using a professional looking email address. You may need to use a gmail or ymail address or something similar, but these can still be professional. You can use your name, or company name, or perhaps a description of your service. Remember though hotbaby@xmail.com or talktomenow@y.com are not professional – keep these for your friends!
- Always include a greeting. Think about it. If you’re walking down the corridor at the office and someone launches into a discussion without saying “hello”, how do you feel? It’s basic politeness.
- End with a signoff phrase. It might be “Kind regards” or “Sincerely”, or even “Thanks for your help”. Again think of how you end a conversation – you don’t just walk away.
- Include your name, position and contact details. You want to make it easy for the other person to contact you. They might want to pick up the phone and call you and they probably don’t want to spend time hunting up your number.
- And before you hit send, re-read your email, run the spell checker, and make sure you haven’t made any silly errors.
We all think of email as an informal way of communicating, but increasingly we are using it for just about everything in business. I’ll leave you with two parting words:
Be professional.
