Get your e-mails read instead of deleted!

By Bing J. Carbone, President, Modern Plastics

If you were to walk into the Modern Plastics office, you’d likely hear a good deal of silence, rather than the phone ringing off the hook?

Why?

As I suspect at many other companies, the major shift from people calling the office and instead sending e-mail, has become the primary means of communications.

Sending an e-mail, especially to a customer, I am a bit fanatical about how I compose it so that it gets read instead of ignored or deleted. Typically, if I am sending an e-mail to a customer it has one of three purposes: to inform, to get a response or often, both.

I have a couple of rules that I implore upon my team that I have found effective, and they are;

1.  Keep it short – you know yourself when you get a lengthy e-mail in the middle of a busy day, you’re going to most likely defer reading it or skip over it altogether. Get straight to the point. Put the essential elements of your purpose for sending the e-mail in the lead rather than burying it deep into the body of the e-mail. Also, short e-mails typically get faster replies.

2.  Pay attention to the time of day – the thinking with e-mail is that it is non-intrusive in terms of getting someone’s attention and that it doesn’t matter the time of day you send it. Best response times are in the morning and later in the day when people tend to really scour their inbox.

3.  Be clear what you are asking for – ever get an e-mail where after you have read it you have no idea what the sender is asking for? Make sure you specifically state what you’d like the recipient to do and/or action to take.

4.  Make it about them – If someone tells me how they are going to make my life easier rather than a rant about themselves, I’m going to read the e-mail. Make sure your e-mail is about the recipient and that you get them invested in your dialogue.

5.  Subject Line – Get a little creative here of a subject line that will intrigue the recipient to read your e-mail. Avoid standard lines such as “Reply” or “Following up.”

In addition, there are a few phrases I avoid in e-mail communications such as; “Sorry to be a burden/bother” (instead try something like, “thank you for your patience”), I abhor “Please advise” (instead, “Please let me know if you have any thoughts on how to proceed with this”) and another one is, “Whatever you think” (how about, “I am open to your ideas”).

The bottom line is to think before “speaking” and ask yourself before hitting the SEND button will you get you the response you need.