TheArchitect.co.uk - Jorgen Thelin's weblog

13 Easy Ways to Craft More Efficient Emails

Jessica Nielsen of vibrant-marketing.com provides a list of 10 Easy Ways to Craft More Efficient Emails

While all 10 are great tips, personally I find the first three to be the most useful ones:

1. Begin the body of your email with a quick statement of why you are writing.
2. Separate questions with bullets.
3. If you have a lot of information to cover, [write] several emails [one for each seperate topic].

Plus I would add three more suggestions:

• Always include a Title for the email in the Subject box.
• Try putting some structure into what you are writing, to break up the "wall of text" into more easily digestible chunks - you know, like paragraphs, sections, headings, line breaks and all that other good stuff that we all learned back in school
• Always re-read your e-mail before sending it. And not just to catch obvious spelling mistakes and other typos, but also to confirm that you really do want to send that e-mail because you can never get it back after you press Send!

How many times have people sent you those unidentifiable "wall of text" emails that makes it very hard to see what they are talking about or what follow up action is expected?

Sorry to be blunt, but people will often simply ignore emails that take too long to read and/or understand.
When in doubt, remember the Internet slang phrase "TL;DR" which is widely used in various online forums - and which very pointedly means "Too Long; Didn't Read" !

Life is short, and we all have better things to do with our time than read lots of verbose emails every day!