Loughborough

# 13 – 23rd February 2008

Email - Friend or Enemy

It never ceases to amaze me how often people tell me about email mis-communication. Most businesses use email at some time in their interactions with suppliers and / or customers. Some businesses rely very heavily on email. Because we send and receive so many emails, we tend to take the communication medium for granted. We forget some of the cardinal rules of writing business letters – it is only an email, what could go wrong! This is when the problems start, a few lines composed in a hurry, sent to a person who skims the text and then acts or replies based on a partial understanding of our ambiguous and incomplete text.

Breaking this down, let us assume that we write an email in a hurry. To keep this simple, we will assume that we have written an unambiguous email including 80% of the information we would have given to the recipient over the telephone or face to face. We hit “Send”. Our customer or supplier reads the email in a hurry and gets 80% of the content we have written. Working this out, the person we have just written to has got 64% of the story – less than two thirds.

(80% of the story) x (80% understood) = 64% of the reality!!

Simple Tips

• Think about the recipient
• Why are you sending an email?
• What do you want them to understand from the text?
• Is it ambiguous?
• Do you really need to copy all these people?
• Could / should this be better done by telephone or face-to-face?
• When you re-read your email, does your message get through?
• If there is the slightest hint of emotion in your reasons for emailing, save the draft, drink a cup of tea (or coffee), re-read the text and assure yourself that you really want to send the email before you press “Send”. If in doubt, wait until tomorrow or telephone.
• Avoid graphics and attachments – especially if your recipient might not be connecting via broad-band.
• The High-Priority flag should be used sparingly.
• Reply to all – do you really need to do this?
• NEVER put all the addresses in the To: or CC: fields in a mass-mailing – use Mail-Merge or Bcc:
• Add a signature to emails (including contact details, regulatory information – see below and a disclaimer).
• Do not send confidential information by email.
  • The internet is public
  • You have no control over the forwarding on by recipients
• Do not forward spoof virus alerts and chain emails – 90% are spoofs
  

 

Remember: UK companies must include certain regulatory information on their websites and in their email footers or they will breach the Companies Act and risk a fine. Every company should list its company registration number, place of registration and registered office address on its website. The information, which must be in legible characters, should also appear on order forms and in emails.

Paul Fileman MIET CEng MCIM
Chartered Marketer
paul.fileman@talktosps.com
Tel:  01509 854447
Mob: 07969 188820
www.talktosps.com