A Practical Guide to Writing an Email that Actually Gets Response!

Roughly 300 billion emails are sent around the world every day, according to Statista. On average, each of us who works in an office gets 121 emails per working day on average!

Recently, I conducted a survey on LinkedIn through My Marketeer and asked “Does your email always get you a reply?” About 35% responded ‘Yes, always’, 60% replied ‘Sometimes’ and 5% even replied ‘No, never’. So, it can be derived from the responses that the majority of the senders are not sure whether or not their emails would be responded. That’s interesting because it conveys the fact that in spite of email being an essential part of today’s business communication, the message that needs to be communicated doesn’t get through properly. What is the way out to improve the communication?

Prof. Dr. Guy Katz and his students decided to optimize their emails and test what worked — and what didn’t. They found that by tweaking just five little things, you would make it more likely that your email got read, you would spend less time working on it, and writing an email might even become fun. Here they are:

1.      Make an excellent first impression

According to the research by Prof. Katz and his team a subject line is your chance to make a positive first impression on your recipient. Three things make an effective subject line: It should be short, call for action and indicate familiarity with the recipient. So, a subject line like “Meeting tomorrow, please respond!” or ‘Hey! ??” presents more chance of the email getting opened up.

2.      Add color and feeling to your email

With just plain text, the emails appear boring. Is there a way to put some colour or feeling to them? According to Prof. Katz, one can use different types of punctuations and emojis to make the emails interesting to read. He likes to call punctuation and emojis as “digital body language”.

Should you always add an emoji or a GIF to your work emails? Of course not. It should be sparingly used based on the context and the work culture.

3.      Keep them as brief as a tweet

Research from NYU, MIT, and Boston University shows that many emails aren’t read but just skimmed or simply deleted. Every additional word beyond 40 reduces the chances of getting an answer. Dr. Katz suggests that the email should be as brief as possible…like a tweet of 280 characters. But you may ask how to convey the subject that requires lengthy text. The answer is attaching that text as a separate document and keep the body of the email as short as possible.

4.      Use names at critical moments

Dale Carnegie once wrote, “A person’s name is to him or her the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” He wrote this almost 100 years ago, but I believe his words still apply today. The name of the person to whom you are writing the email could turn out to be a magic word to grab that person’s attention. If you use the person’s name at the right places in your email you increase the chances of getting a reply to that email. However, you have to be extremely careful about the spelling of the person’s name. Just remember that the person on the other side who would be reading the email would be human.

5.      Tap into the power of the last impression

The last impression of your email is equally important as the first impression because that is powerful and sticks with the reader even after the rest is forgotten. If you have anything important to say or which you feel could be uncomfortable for the reader, try putting it in the P.S. line.

Senior Editor of Wired UK, Victoria Turk, also has some important inputs about the subject. In her opinion, “When you do send an email, you should make it as quick and easy as possible for the recipient to deal with.” Gone are the days when email was considered as the digital version of snail mail letter. Nowadays it is more like a post-it note. So, according to her in the greeting part of the email, one should get rid of the formalities and usage of ‘Dear’ or someone’s title should be restricted to official briefing or invitation.

In the body of the email, one should stick to the point and be concise. But at the same time, it should not be too concise as replying with a single word or so like “received,” “agree,” “OK,” or “?” She says that it sounds impolite. Someone who emails like this is trying to show you how busy and important they are.

For the finishing part, she advises that closing should be simple. While she endorses usage of “best wishes”, “all the best” and “best” to sign off, she feels it very presumptive to end the email with “Thanks in advance”. Even the signature should also be simple with just your name and contact information.

Turk also makes us cautious about using the “cc” rule. She advises that primary recipients of an email, who are expected to respond, should go in the ‘to’ field whereas other recipients of an email, who are not expected to respond — and who are included as a courtesy or for their information — should go into the ‘CC’ field. She shares one very important advice in which she insists that one should always try to send email during normal business hours.

George Bernard Shaw once said “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

Emails are essential. In some situations, they can’t be replaced with a short meeting or a phone call. We send them because of a time difference, or we need to have many people reading the same thing. If we try and adapt the practices as advised by the experts, we will certainly increase the chances of getting responses to our emails. The bottom line is the communication would be clear, through and of course will help improve the productivity in general.