How to write your emails professionally

With so many electronic mediums of communication at our disposal today, many seem unaware of the fact that there is a unique set of unwritten rules that define the proper way to communicate through each of them.

One medium whose rules you should strive to always adhere to is email (electronic mail) because, unlike the other electronic mediums (which are mostly used to relay casual messages), email is often used to convey messages that are very sensitive and a bad email can prove costly.

Examples of sensitive messages conveyed via email include job applications, employment contracts, applications for funding, financial information, meeting appointments, etc.

Therefore, considering how important the messages conveyed via email are, it is important that you always format and send all your emails professionally to achieve effective communication.

Here are four things you should take note of as you write and send your emails.

1.?Do not expect an immediate response

You should not use email to convey messages for which you require an immediate response or reaction from the recipient. Although your email may be delivered to the recipient’s inbox instantly after you send it, there is no guarantee he/she will read or attend to it immediately.

Email is classified as a form of asynchronous communication and therefore, no one is really obliged to read or respond to an email immediately after it is received.

If you send an email that requires immediate attention, always follow it up with a synchronous form of communication (such as a phone call) to the email recipient asking them to attend to your email.

2.?Do not include time-specific greetings

Since you do not know when the person you have emailed will read your message (as explained in 1 above), time-specific greetings should not appear in your email.

It may seem appropriate for you to begin your email with “Good morning, Madam” because you are writing your email in the morning. However, the recipient may read it in the evening, and at that time, your well-intended “Good morning, Madam” greeting will only make your email appear unprofessional.

The other reason to avoid including time-specific greetings in your emails is that a lot of email communication happens across time zones due to international travel and collaborations. This means that even if your email recipient reads your email the moment it arrives in their inbox, a greeting that was appropriate in your time zone may not make sense at all to the recipient.

3.?Never misspell the recipient’s name

Misspelling the name of the person you are writing to is like hoping to get someone’s attention by calling them by a name that is not theirs. It doesn’t work.

Effective communication hinges on keeping your audience interested in your message(s) and misspelling the name of the recipient of your email significantly reduces any recipient's interest in the content of your email.

4.?Apply text formatting

There is room to be artistic as you compose your emails. You can add some art and design to your text to make it attention-grabbing. As long as you think that styling your text will make your email communicate better, do it.

The other important function that text styling can play in your email is highlighting vital information that you do not want the recipient to miss. Information about, for example, dates/deadlines, key assignments, etc., can be made to stand out from the rest of the text by making it bold or styling it with a different colour.

Consider the email extracts below:

Bolding, underlining, or using a different colour for the time and date as shown in extracts a, b, and c above gives greater weight to that particular information hence making it easy for the recipient to take note of the time and date for the report submission deadline.