Business Writing Training: Make Your Emails More Effective, Part 2

Research suggests that the bulk of email is either partly read or not read at all, so you need to do something different to get your email treated differently to everyone else's.

In part one of this article I suggested some methods to get your emails read. The most important of all is to keep them short - target 5 lines or less, because people don't bother to read long emails. I also suggested a number of ways to make your reader know that their attention is valuable to you.

The next mountain to climb is how to get your readers to regard you as high value, and the biggest challenge of all, how to get people to take the actions you ask them to in your emails. These are the two issues I'm going to cover in this article.
Get your target list right

I know someone who sends out emails relating to a particular company software system - technical updates for instance. Many of the messages are long, technical and of interest only to a very small group of users. The sender doesn't have a list of who the users are, so she send messages out to a very wide distribution list. The majority of people who receive messages from Sandra have no need to know or interest in the subject, so they becoming accustomed to ignoring and deleting these messages.

Sandra has made herself into a low value email sender. You must take care to send email only to people who really need the information contained, and of course your messages should be short and easy to understand. Don't add a few extra people to your distribution list 'just to be sure'.

Getting people to take action as a result of your email

This is probably the toughest nut of all, since getting to people to do their actions is pretty difficult in any event. All the preceding rules of good email need to be followed, and the required action must be absolutely clear, explaining what is needed and why. Here are a few methods that will help you get the results you want:

i) Don't ask people to do things you can manage without, or you'll soon be seen as someone who can be ignored. You might think you don't do this - but how many times did you receive an email asking for some action, ignore it and then get no follow-up? This is the test. If you send the request, and your reader ignores if, will you go on to follow it up? If not, don't bother to ask in the first place.

ii) Only ask ONE person to do an action. Often people send out a request on a message to a list of people say, for instance 'please will one of you get the figures to me by Friday'. Everyone who receives this can happily ignore it and assume that someone else will do it.

iii) If you need action from someone, and email alone is most unlikely to get a result. It can serve as a useful reminder, but you need to chase it up with a phone call or where possible a personal visit. If its someone in your company pop and see them to explain why you need their action and how it will be of benefit. Both of these tactics are effective because it clearly demonstrates the value you place on the recipients input.

iv) If you set a deadline, expect it to be met. A good tool is to ask people to set their own deadline, so there's no excuse that it couldn't be met. For instance, call up and ask 'when can you get this done by'. Set an outlook reminder to yourself to call a few days before the deadline. If the action isn't seen as high value to you, it won't be seen as high value at second hand.

Source: Colne Brooks link

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Business Writing Training: Make Your Emails More Effective, Part 2