5 Things I Do To Write Effective Work Emails

This article originally appeared on Medium.

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If anyone told me a couple of years ago that as a manager, my life would generally tend to revolve around emails, I would have had my doubts.

However, the screenshot below certainly paints an interesting picture and is why I have had the opportunity to learn a few tips and tricks to writing effective work emails that actually get the job done.

Read on to find out my top 5 tips and tricks on writing emails with military precision:

1. Context and Request

A few of you might find this a bit peculiar, but when it comes to emails that require action from the receiver, I tend to add a bit more structure by clearly providing and identifying both the context of the e-mail and the exact request I am making.

The first reason I started to do this more often was that while looking through emails I received, I realised that I spent a better part of those first few minutes trying to figure out what the exact context was behind the request. I then figured that there would most likely be other people out there treating my emails to them the same way.

Now although subject lines exist for this purpose, most times, they aren’t enough to paint a sufficient picture and frankly, not everyone does a good job of summarising their emails within the subject without doing something like this:

Therefore, using the first 4–5 lines at the start of your email to provide context, goes a long way towards getting the response you require without necessarily requiring back and forth emails.

Secondly, clearly highlighting the request you are making (plus other high-level information) helps your reader scan through the key points of the email in little to no time at all.

2. Subject Lines

Speaking of subject lines, never ever send an email through without a subject line. It looks wrong, feels wrong and genuinely paints you as someone who lacks basic email etiquette (or more).

I try to not be too judgmental in life, but it is a little hard to take a person seriously when you receive an email looking like this:

Therefore when writing subject lines, I tend to specify if an action is required from the reader or if I’m just passing information across. This is to help draw responses out from folks who take temporary decisions on emails based on an email’s subject alone, before opening them later on.

3. The Email Layout

Taking a quick look at the screenshot below, you will notice some indented paragraphs. I generally do this to make my emails readable/scannable.

My rule of thumb goes thus:

“If the information acts as a support to the main purpose/context of the email, there should be a visual marker to the person on the receiving end.”

4. Call-outs and Links

When it comes to links, I generally create them in a way that causes them to flow within the sentence they are contained in.

For example, instead of saying “You can follow me on twitter here”, I’d opt for “You can follow me on twitter here”. Looking through some of the data I track with emails I send out, it delivers better click-through results.

I also try to strategically highlight key information that should not be missed, as well as the name of the individual who that information might be aimed at (N.B the highlighted bit in the screenshot above is only to draw your attention to what I’m attempting to explain)

5. Signing Off

After crafting the bait for my subject-line, outlining the context and the request I am making, indenting secondary information and highlighting call-outs and links, the last trick I regularly use, is to include a prompt at the end of the email that lets the recipient know I’ll actually be waiting for a response.

There you have it, my 5 tips and tricks for writing effective emails at work.

You can also check out more articles I've written on my medium page.

'Tobi