9 Professional Email Best Practices

PUBLISHED July 21, 2015 IN Branding & Messaging

WRITTEN BY Myah Shein

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In professional services, we are hired to take care of things for clients that they don’t fully understand.  Therefore, the year-round treatment and communications clients receive from your team become how they determine the quality of your work.  It may not be logical, but it’s true.  We all have email inboxes that constantly full despite heroic efforts to clear them out.   But it’s not a race to the bottom.  Here are nine email best practices.

Take time to be polite:  Instead of “see attached” or some other short-cut, curt message, take the time to say hello, express kindness such as “I hope you are well” or if you remember something about the client, inquire about it specifically.  Explain what is attached to the email and why.  Let the client know that if they have questions, you’d be glad to help.  If they need to take any action (and especially if there is a deadline) outline that for them.  Clients are busy, so over serve and always do it with a smile.

Email footers should include all useful contact information:  Someone who wants to reach you may look to your email for your contact information. Make it easy for them!

Useful subject line:  “Meeting date changed,” “Quick question about your presentation,” or “Suggestions for the proposal.” People decide whether to open an email based on the sender and the subject line.

Be wary of reply all:  The person creating the distribution list in the first place should be thoughtful about who to include in the “To” field. But those replying should be thoughtful about it as well when replying.  A common misuse of “reply all” is on full company announcements and the “congratulations” that follow.

Make your grade school teachers proud!: Use spelling, grammar and punctuation properly according to what your grade school teachers taught you and you’ll be fine. Avoid multiples of things (!!!) and anything missing (like periods) or incomplete sentences.

Keep it simple:  Delete unneeded email chains before forwarding. Unless the emails in an email chain are needed to give context, delete the below messages.  This is particularly true for external recipients.  Alternatively, consider starting a fresh email and reference a previous message.  This one in particular could be more difficult to achieve on a smart phone so consider when an email will be best replied to when you’re back in the office.

No instruction necessary – or is it?:  It may be obvious to you what needs to be done, but forwarding a file or email chain isn’t the most polite, or productive, way to ask someone to do something. Take the one minute to spell it out for the recipient anyway.

Think before you type and get to the point:  Consider how many emails you get in a day. Your clients likely get just as many.  Keep your message clear, concise, and targeted.  Be thoughtful in your communications and be clear in your requests.

Timely response: Some companies have a “response time” policy.  They promise a one-day turnaround or something similar.  Even if your firm doesn’t have this, consider what your personal policy is.

BONUS – Step away from the keyboard:  Sometimes an email is not the right communication method. Pick up the phone or walk down the hallway sometimes too!

These best practices may be obvious to you.  Consider whether your younger associates or new hires, particularly those right out of college who have more experience texting than emailing and very little experience emailing for professional reasons, will find this useful.