Reply CC

You get an email from a friend. By mistake you reply CC rather than reply To. You make a very private comments about a third party, not realising you have sent the message to them. Always be very careful when using CC. It means everyone gets a copy.

Forwarding Embarassing stuff.

An email may contain several replies and message. If you forward this email onto someone, you my forward comments from someone else to people they never intended to read that message. When forwarding always check to bottom of email and all replies and to. Best practise is to delete it.

Autofill Email Address

You have a boss called john_tucket. You have a boyfriend called john_trader. It is an easy mistake to autofill the wrong p erson. Before you know it you have sent your romantic thoughts to your boss, and your willingness to do overtime to your boyfriend.

Regret

Email is so easy. You can fire off a few quick sarcastic remarks, but then the next day you deeply regret sending off an email in the heat of the moment. You can’t retrieve email.

Examples

Forwarding Email without permission

In 2000, Claire Swires sent an email to her then boyfriend while working at the London law firm, Norton Rose. It was quite explicit. But, unbeknown to her, her boyfriend forwarded it on to ‘one or two friends’ who then forwarded it on to ‘one or two more friends’ Before you knew it, the email had been forwarded around the world.

A police officer who sent an email to her colleagues asking: “who stole my yoghurt out of the fridge? Unfortunately she accidentally sent the email to the entire state police force and received many a reply including…. “Do you need the FBI? Have you sealed off the area? Has the dog unit been called?”

Books on Writing Emails

• Penguin Guide to Writing Emails

• Email English

Related

• Art of writing good emails
• Rules for sending emails
• Tips for writing effective emails

Related

• Embarrassing emails at the Sun

These are some Basic Email Etiquette Rules.

1. Be Brief and to the Point. Don’t give your life history or fill your email with off topic complaints. Keep it simple and keep it to the point.
2. Acknowledge Receipt of Important Emails. If someone answers a question or gives you a useful piece of information, it is polite to acknowledge receipt with a simple, thank-you. If you’re not sure whether you need to acknowledge receipt. Try to position yourself as the sender, if you sent that email, would you appreciate acknowledgement. Also, read the email and pick up whether the sender expects a reply or not.
3. Be Polite. Sarcasm, criticism and off beat humour can easily be misunderstood.
4. If it is very important find a better communication channel.
5. Don’t Be Angry, aggressive or obnoxious in sending emails. It can really create problems.
6. Don’t write emails for the sake of it. No one likes to have endless emails coming through their inbox. Try to limit the number you send. Keep emails for important things.
7. Have a clear sense of purpose. A good email should be no more than two paragraphs. It should focus on one issue at a time. If you need to talk about unrelated emails, send more than one email.
8. Make sure the title is descriptive and matches the content of the email. If it is important, add to title, but, use this rarely.
9. Write in good, reasonable English. People don’t expect perfection, but unless your writing to your fourteen year old niece, abbreviations like OMG, ROFL, WTF, and shortened words like tx thx are not good.
10. Don’t Be obliged to respond to emails. If you receive a heated email that leaves you disturbed, sometimes it is better not to respond at all. Perhaps letting the issue cool off before sending a completely new message or speak to the person.
11. Be careful about forwarding on someone else’s message. If your co-workers writes to you complaining about something. Don’t forward this onto your boss without their permission. Also, be careful off ccing their message to more than workers.
12. Be very careful of replying to all. There is a big difference between replying to all and replying to an individual.
13. Don’t write anything, you wouldn’t be happy to say to the person if they were standing right in front of you.
14. Emails should be treated like a postcard in terms of security. Always imagine that your email could end up being read by someone you didn’t intend to read it.
15. Don’t Spam. Sorry if this is obvious, but, you can do your company reputation alot of damage by sending unsolicited emails.

Books on Writing Emails

• Penguin Guide to Writing Emails

• Email English

Related

• Art of writing good emails
• Rules for sending emails
• Tips for writing effective emails

Email Marketing Strategies

Choose Good Title.

The title of the email is vital. It has to be interesting and catch the imagination of the receiver. It should giver the receiver a good reason to click on the email and actually read it. A bad title will lead to many emails just being deleted. In the title avoid the hardsell, suggest a benefit to the customer.

• Example of Good Email Title – “Free Sample of Our Latest Product Development”
• How to Improve your Cycle Training e.t.c.

Make sure the title doesn’t trigger off spam filters. Avoid words like sex and “Massive Sale”

The First sentence is vital.

The trick is to engage people early. Give a reason for people to keep reading. Offer them a benefit to reading this email, looking at this product. Otherwise it will not be mentioned

Personalise the Email.

It is vital to be able to address people by their names. Dear Tom, is much better than Yo!. IF you address people by their first name, it creates a feeling that there is already a relationship. It also reassures the recipient that it is not spam. A good email proivder like Aweber enables you to do this.

Choose a Good Email Provider

Don’t be tight and try to get by on a free email sender. A good email sender like Aweber will save alot of time and hassle.

Relevance.

The key to a good email marketing campaign is building up a targetted email list and sending out on topic emails. It is not numbers that is important but subscribers who will have an interest in your products.

Be Focused

In emails don’t try to do too much. Keep it to one or two products at most. Make it clear what you have to offer and how they can participate

Easy click through.

The key is to get people to click through and visit a targetted landing page. Instinctively people are most used to clicking on underlined dark blue links, so click on these.

Repeat Emails

If you have a really good product / service. It may be appropriate to send two or three emails. It is often on the third email that people will actually click through

Provide useful Information not just Selling tactics.

If you have an email list that sends out great tips with no selling involved, they will be more receptive to your emails that recommend a product. Get a good balance between selling and informing.

Best Time For Sending Emails.

The Best time for sending emails is thought to be Tuesday and Wednesday. In middle or early part of the day. Internet useage really drops off by Friday and at the weekend. The difference in visitors is often 50% lower at the weekend. Whenever you send emails, make sure you keep to a regular sending pattern.

Make absolutely sure, you are sending it to the right person. It is unfortunately too easy, to send an email to the wrong point. A small mistake in sending to wrong person could cost you your job or a relationship. see: Email disasters
2. Don’t Use Autofill.

Autofill is when you start typing in a name and your email client automatically fills the name in for you. However, there is real potential for disaster. Imagine you are writing to tim_your_boyfriend and autofil fills in tim_your_miserable_boss. – It could be very painful.

3. Do You Really Want to Reply To All?

A good email client should always ask people, do you really want to send this personal message to your boss to every 200 employers on this mailing list? However, they don’t and because of a careless mistake, you have broadcast your thoughts to 200 people, when it was intended for one. Needless to say, this can be very embarrassing for all concerned. Always stop and think – Who am I sending it to.

4. Keep It Polite.

Email is a very impersonal method of communication. It is easy to be misunderstood. Whatever you do try to be polite and avoid making sarcastic comments.

5. For Difficult Situations Don’t use Email.

If there is a very awkward situation, ask yourself whether you could find a better mechanism for dealing with the issue. Speaking to people face to face, helps to avoid misunderstanding.

6. Treat Email Like A Postcard

Email is Not Secure. The contents of email can be easily hacked into. When writing an email, think of it like a postcard, you don’t know who might be reading it so you will keep very sensitive information to other more secure methods of communication.

7. Keep it Short.

Emails should be kept brief and to the point. Make sure you don’t wander off topic adding unnecessary emotion. Keep to a specific subject; if you have several issues try sending different emails, or at the very least try to break it up.

8. Turn off Auto Alert.

It is best to check email a couple of times a day. You don’t need to be alerted every time an email comes, it will just distract you from your task. Check emails when you have time and space to respond properly, rather than rushing off a response.

9. Delay Sending.

For any message that is potentially contentious, wait a few hours before sending; it is sometimes good to wait overnight. You will not regret waiting to review the message. But, you will regret sending a message written in anger / an emotional state.

 10. Give Proper Title to email

This makes it easier to keep track and note whether the email is worth reading.

11. Delete old message in emails and be Careful in CCing messages.

If you are replying to a message, clear out the quoted stuff at the bottom, unless relevant. Be careful, if you reply to someone and cc someone else. The quoted message at the bottom of the email may not be appropriate. Also be wary of sending an email to someone who is likely to forward or cc that message to an inappropriate person.

 12. Keep Your Inbox Clear.

Use folders and move messages to the appropriate folder. Thing is your inbox should be messages that require some action on your part. At appropriate times either respond to the email or move it to the relevant folder.

13. Keep Work and Business Separate

It can be good to have separate email adresses for work and social. At weekends you might like to check messages from friends without seeing some work email which would be better leaving until Monday morning.

14. Use A Professional Signature

A professional signature at the bottom of your email helps your message appear more authorative.

15.  Use Good English.

If you keep emails short and to the point, then it will not be inconvenient to write in proper English with good spelling and punctuation. If you don’t have time to use a spell checker and write in good English, you are probably writing too many emails.

Books on Writing Emails

• Penguin Guide to Writing Emails

• Email English

See also:

• Tips for effective emails 
• The Art of writing emails 

Actually, it’s pretty gruesome reading. Some of the common mistakes come from:

• Replying all rather than replying to an individual.
• Using Auto complete for recipient. e.g. you want to write to steve_myboyfriend but autofill fills in steve_myboss.

It is also worth pointing out that:

• Email is not secure. You should feel like you are sending a postcard. It could be read by anyone.
• There is a lot to be said for using phone / letter for more important discussions.

At least there was one that made me laugh:

“I accidentally e-mailed a copy of university final exam to all of my students the night before the exam. Fortunately, they didn’t mind.” — Posted by Kara

Just because something is good and can save time, doesn’t mean it will always be useful.

Basic email etiquette comes down to common sense and good manners.

• Keep it simple
• Keep it polite
• Keep it to the point
• Write in proper English, avoid sounding like a text message
• Minimise useage of email; there are many better ways of communicating people.

Useful Articles on Email

• Tips for Writing Emails
• The Art of Writing Good emails 
• How To Avoid Email Embarassment 
• Email Overload  - The dangers of using email too much.

See also: 

• Tips for effective communication at my self improvement blog

Make it Clear.

The first rule for writing an effective email is that the message and content should be clear. Unfortunately I often receive emails with about 7 different questions all in the same sentence. It makes replying very difficult. To write with clarity it is essential to keep the message no longer than necessary. Also try to stick to just one point. If you want to cover several topics, write different emails with the title showing the correct topic. This also makes archiving emails easier.

Keep it Simple and Short

Related to the first point about clarity, simplicity is the essence of a good email. Try and convey the point using the minimum number of sentences and words. For example, if you are writing about a solution to the problem, don’t add a lengthy story about why you have been delayed in answering. If a word doesn’t add anything worthwhile, leave it out.

Don’t Be Vague

Before writing an email, have a clear idea about its purpose. If necessary ask direct questions, or strongly suggest some alternatives. Don’t leave it open ended and vague – get to the point.

Good Use of Language

I think it is a mistake to feel that just because it is an email we can ignore the basic essentials of English language. Maybe we got into bad habits when dealing with friends. But, we increasingly use emails for dealing with official business; in these cases the quality of English should be similar to a letter. Remember the quality of your English will also have a subconscious impact on how you are perceived by others. If you can’t be bothered to use a spell checker and capitalise the letter i, it doesn’t look good.

The importance of Reflection

The ease of which we can write emails, is also a potential problem. Most people will have had the experience of sending an email, which soon after, they regret writing. For any important or contentious issue, it is always best to ‘let it lie for a while’ before posting. A delayed email is better than an email which creates more problems. If you have any hesitation in sending, you could also ask for a second opinion from a trusted friend. They may be able to offer a dispassionate perspective on your email.

Be Polite

If you are writing an email about a complaint, it is important to keep it polite and avoid language that might be regretted later. Remember that an email can easily be misinterpreted because it is a very limited form of communication; usually when we speak we have the added benefit of using facial expressions. For example, we may say something in a sarcastic manner, in verbal communication this is fine because people see we are joking; but, with an email our ‘humour’ can easily be misinterpreted. With this in mind it is always better to be polite and conservative.

Is it Necessary?

We can make the mistakes of sending too many emails. Some issues may be better dealt with by telephone or meeting the person. If the issues is very sensitive consider whether you will have more success by speaking in person. Basically, don’t write if not necessary.

Set Time Aside for Writing Emails.

It is easy to check our emails too often. Just because we have a few minutes to spare doesn’t mean we should check our email yet again. The problem is that if we try to answer emails when we have a shortage of time, our answers will be rushed and maybe inappropriate. It is better to set aside one or two periods in the day when we can write the best response without any undue time pressure.

Ignore Criticism.

Sometimes you may receive an email which is complaining about a certain issue and furthermore adds personal criticism. It is difficult to respond to criticism like this. However, one option which I find successful is to ignore the personal criticism and just address the issue at hand. If you start defending yourself or respond in a similar way you will get drawn into an unnecessary dispute.

The Welcoming Email.

If you have a new customer or new reader of your blog, a quick email is an effective way to build up a closer relationship. A short welcoming email is non obtrusive and helps to reduce the distance between yourself and your readers. For example, if I receive a comment from a new reader I will try and reply with a short message like:
“Thanks for your comment, it is much appreciated. We hope you will enjoy our future blog posts.”

I prefer a personalised message to an automated welcoming message you can get from a plugin. This quick email does 2 things:

• gives appreciation to reader (could also be a customer)
• It also gives an encouragement for the reader to come back to the promised future blog posts.

When to end an Email Conversation.

A good question about emails is when to end the conversation. Once the business is achieved it is fine to stop. However, in some circumstances it might be appropriate to acknowledge the feedback with a thank-you. There are no hard and fast rules, but, as a general suggestion if it is the first time of conversing with others, thanking others can be a good touch.

Acknowledging Others

When we become busy, we can become overwhelmed with emails. However, there is a lot to be said for acknowledging every important request, enquiry. Even if we can’t deal with it, it is nice to get something in return. If you find this idea very difficult, make use of draft messages and automated response. For example, if you write to a top blogger. You may get an email reply like this. “thanks for you email. I will try answer it, but, due to the volume of emails it may not be possible to answer every one.” This is a reasonable point, and if you don’t have time to respond at least you have made some effort.

Books on Writing Emails

• Penguin Guide to Writing Emails

• Email English

Related Posts

• How To Avoid Email Embarrassment
• The Art of Writing Emails

1. Always double check who you are sending it to.

For example, be careful about replying to all – when you want to just reply to one person.

2. Be careful about leaving old messages at the bottom of an email.

To send an email I often reply to an old email in my inbox. If you cc this message to someone else make sure that the old message is not inappropriate; it is potentially very embarrassing. It is of course best to delete any old messages and discussions, and, it can be easy to forget.

3. Save to drafts for a few hours.

The biggest cause of embarrassment is that we send emails in the heat of the moment, which we later regret. If we have any important or potentially awkward emails, it is always best to leave a gap between writing and sending. It is better to have a delay than send an inappropriate email. Often when we wait a few hours, or even sleep on it, we get a very different feeling for what is appropriate.

4. Could you say this message to the person?

Imagine the recipient of the email, is right in front of you. Then read out the email and decide whether you would be comfortable doing this. If you would feel awkward saying these things then don’t send the email.

5. Be careful with language.

A good email should use good English, and avoid getting emotional or unnecessarily personal. Never write an email in anger, or frustration. You can still express your displeasure, but, try to maintain a diplomatic tone.

6. The World still Existed Before Email

10 years ago, nobody used email, but, the world still existed. The point is that it is often better to communicate through traditional means, especially for sensitive messages. Think carefully about the message, and if appropriate speak to the person directly.

7. Ask a friend to check the Email.

If you have an important email to send, it is worth asking a reliable friend to check it first. Sometimes a second opinion can prevent an awkward situation. One email I was going to send, a friend was able to insert just one word. But, it made a big difference to the message of the email.
More Tips for writing Emails