I receive about 50 legitimate business e-mails a day (along with a few hundred spam e-mails). My biggest recommendations are:
Always proof, proof, proof e-mails before sending them. Grammatical, spelling and punctuation errors, along with abbreviations, are disconcerting. An e-mail says something about the sender. Remember the old adage, “We don’t get a second chance at our first impression.” Whether your e-mail is going to customers, prospective customers, vendors, your association office, or anyone else, give serious thought to how it will be received.
Always include a subject line that is very definitive. Here are some real life subject lines: meeting, dinner, audio-visual needs, agenda, photo, etc. None of these help me know whether to open them or not and certainly they are not identifiable a week or a month down the road. Instead of the above, use: XYZ meeting details for 2/2/13, Board dinner details, AV needed for 2/2/13 speech, New product for your car wash, Agenda for 2/2/13 conference, Photo of Joe Schmo attached, etc.
And, have you ever received an e-mail where “No subject” is on the subject line? When we don’t indicate something specific, the recipient will receive “No subject” on the subject line, which implies it should NOT be opened.
Always double check the subject line to be sure it changes with the changes of focus of the actual e-mail. Often, with the thread, the focus changes several times in the course of multiple e-mails going back and forth.
Always use definitive document names. Here are some document names I have received recently: Meeting.doc, agenda.doc, photo.jpg, new products.doc. In each case, there is no way to identify those documents in the future. Instead, the documents should read: XYZ Meeting 2-2-13.doc, Agenda for XYZ meeting 2-2-13.doc, Joe Schmo photo.jpg, Joe Schmo bio.doc.
We have heard many times that the little things can make a big difference. Let’s give more attention to our e-mails.