It's no surprise to anyone (unless you're fortunate enough to be living off the grid) that email is the most used communication channel in American business. Yes, 95% of organizations still rely on email as their preferred mode of internal communication, despite having access to social media, instant messaging and other formats. (Now, whether email is the most effective channel is a topic for a different article.)
We receive an avalanche of electronic messages daily. People are swiping right or left on which messages to answer right away and which to ignore. With "personal attention" at the top of the endangered species list, people logically budget their focus like they do with any other finite resource: according to usefulness.
The pearls of wisdom you are about to read are to help you write emails in a way that people will find useful and will actually want to read. You have two options: 1) Make them more entertaining, or 2) make them more easy to absorb and act upon.
Strategy 1: Add entertainment value.
Have you ever used WD-40 to fix a squeaky door? Or to help you open something? It's a product designed to reduce friction. In communication, entertainment works like that. Humor grabs people's attention, thus they listen.
However, proceed with caution. What you don't want to grab is the attention of the HR manager for being inappropriate.
To be entertaining without losing your job, consider how to make your communication more interesting. The easiest way to add humor is to choose unusual words like "zippy" or "delightful" instead of "great" when people ask how you are doing.
What if you wrote that the project was moving "at the pace of an arthritic zombie?" What if you described the pushback on your project as "balderdash?" That would grab some eyeballs.
If this vocabulary challenge sounds impossibly time-consuming, I understand. Let's move to Strategy No. 2, then.
Strategy 2: Make your email easier to read and act upon.
The most common complaint I hear about emails is that people don't know what they are supposed to do with them, as there is no clear call to action. In fact, often nothing about them is clear at all. The email can look like "word vomit."
Start with the subject line. That's a handy place to put your call to action, even if it's FYI only. Consider these potential subject lines:
• 'FYI only: No response needed.' Imagine how happy it would make someone to receive such a message.
• 'Unless I hear from you by COB today, this project moves forward.' This could sound threatening, which is appropriate at times, but not always.
• 'Let me know which option you want by COB Friday.' Everyone loves having options, and this is a great way to preface them. Construct your email so that people can choose from option A, B, C or D.
The Non-Optional Strategy
There is a third strategy, though this one isn't optional. It's called "Plenty of White Space."
Yes, too much text on a page is stressful, leaving the recipient to never want to gaze upon your message again. Surround your chosen words with lots and lots of white space.
More than having a friendly greeting and being typo-free, emails that are easy to read and entertaining are the ones to which we naturally want to pay attention to. It may take more time and effort, but if you take the trouble to craft email messages of higher quality, you win by having to write fewer emails. How's that for a win?
