Consulting Journal: Style - Email style (1)

Style: Email style (1)

by David Blakey

You can make email messages look good and deliver your messages clearly.

[Monday 6 January 2003]

Your email messages should demonstrate your professionalism. You can do this in two ways: through the standard content of email messages and through the content of your own emails. In this article we shall look at the first of these.

Standard content

Let's start from the top and work down.

From

The From header should contain your name and email address. My From header is David Blakey . It looks better if you have your name as well as your email address. You appear more as a person than just an email address. Autoresponders, mailing lists and spammers have email addresses; only people have names.

You should try to make sure that your real name will appear. Some organizations include other information in the name that appears next to the email addresses of their employees. Try to avoid being blakeyd[akl:nz]. It strikes me as strange that so many consulting practices use names like this for email messages when they are really only useful for their intranets. If they really want to be able to employ another blakeyd in another office, then they really should be able to come up with a better method rather calling them blakeyd[chi:il:us].

To

Much the same applies to the To header. Use your recipient's real name. Use the form that the recipient prefers. If Michael Smith prefers to be Mike Smith or Michael J Smith, then use it. This shows that you know them, and that you have taken care to address them properly.

If you are sending a single email to several people, there are three ways in which you can do this.

You can put the entire list of names in the To header. This means that each recipient will see who all the other recipients are. This can be very useful on assignments when you want continuous, visible lines of communication. It is especially useful when you have a number of stakeholders.

One possible difficulty with this is the order in which the names appear. It is easiest to use alphabetic order on last name. If you try to put people into some kind of hierarchical order, you can run into problems.
You can have a single entry - a ‘group’ - in your email address book. You send the email with the group name in the To header.

While this method seems to be popular, it raises some problems. First, no one who receives it will know who else has received it. If the content is confidential, they will not know who else knows it. Second, this method is time-dependent. Records of emails will show the group name, but the members of the group may change over time. It may be difficult to trace who received an email that was sent to the group some time ago.
You can use the ‘blind copy’ facilities of most email software, by putting the recipients' name into the Bcc header. This raises the first problem that we saw with using groups, although it avoids the second, provided that the sender keeps copies of emails so that all recipients' names can be verified.

Frankly, the simplest option - all recipients in alphabetic order in the To header - is the easiest to manage and control and to audit.

Some people have problems when their email message will be sent to other people in their own organization. I dislike the option of putting all the client's recipients in the To header and all the consulting firm's recipients in the Bcc header. My first objection is the same as above, for blind copies. My second is that both the client's and firm's recipients should know who all the other recipients are. The one advantage of always listing all recipients in the To header is that it can avoid unnecessary copying of email messages to people in your own organization who like to get them but who do not need them. Your client might ask ‘Why does So-and-so get a copy?’ You should have a better answer than internal politics.

Subject

Your subject line should be clear. The recipient should see immediately that this is a serious email message. Avoid the buzzwords of spam: don't use ‘new’ or ‘offer’ or any of the other words that you associate with spam yourself. It can be useful to include your organization's name in square brackets at the beginning of the subject, as in [consultingjournal] Confirmation. After a while, your clients and prospects will recognize emails from you and will respond them to quickly. Their response should be to read them. Their response may be to send them to ‘trash’. To avoid this happening, make sure that all your emails which have this prefix to their subject have high quality content. If you once use the prefix on bulk-mailed ‘special offers’, then you can expect that people will automatically trash similarly headed emails from you.

We shall look at the content of the body of emails in the next article.

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