7 Best Tips for Effective Email Communication in 2020

It has been approximately 50 years since the first form of email communication was incepted. It all began when a Massachusetts resident Ray Tomlinson, a computer programmer, created the first-ever email system and sent the first one. That was way back in 1971.

Of-course everything is quite different now and there are billions of emails sent per day all over the world, but how many of them are perfect in every way? How can you make sure that the email you are sending to whoever in your personal or private life, is going to have the desired effect?

To make sure that you draft the best possible email every single time your fingers touch that keyboard, just use the following tips in your email communication and we can personally guarantee that your email game is going to be top-notch.

7 Best Tips for Effective Email Communication

1. Find out Your Purpose for Writing the Email

Just like a project proposal in project management or a design of a building before it is constructed, you need to make sure that you have a purpose in mind that justifies why you are writing the particular email.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a personal or a professional email, you just have to have a purpose in mind.

But even before we do all that, you need to be 100% sure that the email channel is the best possible medium to have the conversation that you are about to have. Maybe you need to call the other person or text them. This depends on the type of conversation that you are about to have.

If it is a normal message like having a quick conversation with anyone, you should just text them on the phone because that interaction does not require any lengthy email chains that take a lot of time to conclude.

But if you are having doubts about the type of conversation that would require you to send an email to the other person, check out the following list and decide, whether your interaction makes the cut.

You should send an email if you:

• Want to broadcast information to a large number of people
• Want to talk to someone that you haven’t talked to in a while and you don’t have their phone number
• Want to provide feedback to an employee about their work performance
• Want to attach different types of attachments to your text

But you should always avoid writing emails when you are doing things like:

• Delivering incredibly private information
• Waiting for a quick response from the other person, because no one replies quickly to emails
• Delivering information that is bound to be sad and shocking for the recipient

Check this out: 

• The Best Email Alternatives of 2020

2. Using the Right Email Communication Style

The next thing that you have to do is to make sure that you are using the right type of email style both in language and structure, to make sure that the email you are writing is going to have the desired effect on the recipient.

To make sure that you are using the right email style, you first need to make sure what the relationship between you and the recipient is. Are they a co-worker, family member, boss, or your partner?

You do this because you obviously won’t send an email to organize a sleepover or a gaming night, and you will not send a text message to your boss about a meeting saying “Sup, Bossman?” (would be cool though, but don’t do it).

When you make sure that the person you are sending the email to, deserves to be communicated through this channel and you have established what the relationship between you guys is, then you are ready to draft that email.

It’s a general rule that when you are communicating with anyone from the office or with someone with whom you haven’t talked to in a while, you should always use a more professional writing style or a formal writing style.

But if you are communicating with someone who is on informal terms with you like a family member, you are free to use informal language.

3. The Subject Line should be Crystal Clear

The subject line is one of the most important elements in any email. It is the first thing that the recipient needs to make sure that the email is worth their time or not. This subject line is so important that it is even more useful than the first lines of the email and even the offer inside it.

How is that possible? Well according to statistics, more than 125 billion business emails are sent to and from people all over the world with an average of 125 emails per person. How many emails are read to the last word and how many are tossed out?

Research has shown that with so many emails filling up your mailboxes every day, normal people don’t open up all of the emails that they are sent to, instead, they only see the subject line of the email and if that matches their interest, then and only then would they open the email.

To make sure that you write the most appealing subject line for all of your emails, here are some steps that you can follow.

• Make the length of your subject line is no more than 6-10 words
• You need to make sure that the subject line is personalized for the person, company or business that you are trying to communicate with
• You need to pick just the right set of words to make sure that the subject line acts as a trailer for the amazing content included in the email
• You need to do the research and include a high-open rate keyword in the subject line to make sure that the recipient will check out the email

4. Formatting is King In Email Communication

Choosing the right tone, the right recipient, and the right subject line is necessary but not as necessary as the formatting you have to do to make sure that you don’t send the recipient a large block of text, which they will discard the second they see the email.

So, how can you make the formatting so appealing that the bounce rate for the email is reduced?

Follow the following steps and you will have the best possible format for the body of text included in your email.

• Firstly, you need to MAKE SURE that your paragraphs are no more than two or three-sentence long
• Secondly, you need to shine a light on the most important piece of information that is included in the email via bolding the text, italicizing the text, put it into inverted commas or do all of that and underling the whole thing too
• After that, you need to select the right font style
• Select the right font size
• And lastly, you need to make sure that you use enough spacing between salutations, body paragraphs and greeting, etc.

5. Proofread the Whole Thing

After doing all of the steps mentioned above and before even thinking of pushing the “Send Button”, you need to make sure that everything that you have written in the email is 100% error and fault-proof.

This means that you have to make sure that there is no spelling mistake in the whole text body, there are no grammatical mistakes in the whole shebang, there are no tautologies in the whole story and on top of all that, you need to make sure that you are not addressing the wrong person.

If you are a novice and you can’t do all that by yourself, then you can easily use software like Microsoft Word that will edit your text effortlessly and will make sure that there are no errors in it, or you can use a software like Grammarly that was specifically designed to make your text error-proof.

Some other rules and regulations you need to follow when you are proofreading your emails are:

• Make sure that the names that you are using in your emails are 100% correct and not faulty
• You need to make sure that the email is properly signed off with your surname or name, at the end of the email
• You need to make sure that all of the attachments that you are connecting with the email are working or not
• You need to make sure that the email of the recipient is 100% correct otherwise you can send some very confidential information to someone else, which you can do nothing about afterward

6. Common Blunder In Email Communication | Using “Bcc” instead of “Cc”

One of the worst things that you can do while sending emails is sending it to the wrong address. This is one of the most common mistakes people do in email communication. And the other one is giving out their email addresses like it’s a piece of candy.

To make sure that you don’t make these mistakes when you are sending out thousands and thousands of emails to clients or whoever, there are two features that you might’ve seen while writing an email. They are Bcc and Cc.

Bcc or Blind Carbon Copy is a feature that allows you to keep someone in the loop via the information in the email but they can’t see the other recipients of the email. And in the case of Cc, they can.

But why does this matter? What harm can an email address do? Well, for some people their email address is a very private thing and they make sure that they only those out to the people very close to them.

So, to make sure that you don’t accidentally let some stranger see the list of the recipients of your email, you have to add them to your Bcc section.

7. Name Your Attachments Wisely

One of the most important and potentially harmful components in email communication is attachments. Researches have shown that attachments are still the number one carrier of viruses and malware. They have an incredible ability to infect an electronic device in seconds.

This is why many email platforms like Gmail and such, have placed different spamming and other security protocols to track and disarm any potentially harmful attachments. All of this security is well and good, but the problem is that these security protocols sometimes flag the good ones as spam.

To make sure that your attachments don’t get flagged as spam, just follow these steps.

• Firstly, you need to make sure that the attachments you are connecting to your email are properly relevant to the email that you are sending. So, it’s not a bunch of cat pictures attached to an office email or a memorial invitation email.
• Secondly, you need to make sure that the filename of the attachment isn’t a bunch of random words and letters. You must rename them accordingly and set the extension names properly so that the attachments don’t get flagged and the email is sent.

Use nTask for managing your files and attachments: 

nTask – Task Management Software

Over to You:

If you are just about getting your feet wet in the field of email communication tactics, you may as well grab a few useful eBooks from the online market. They will help you to hone your skills and deliver effective punchlines.

After all, keeping readers engaged through short, concise, and effective email communication is the point of remaining one step ahead of the competition these days.