Business E-Mail Etiquette 101

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E-mail is something that’s become so ubiquitous in the workplace these days that we hardly give a second thought to how it’s revolutionised the way businesses communicate.

According to recent figures published by technology market research firm The Radicati Group worldwide email traffic will reach 247 billion messages per day in 2009, growing to a staggering 507 billion messages per day by 2013. That means that this year we’ll be sending 2,858,796 e-mails every single second, 37% of them business e-mails. That’s a lot of communication!

Part of e-mail’s business appeal is the speed and convenience with which it lets us communicate with our colleagues around the office and around the globe. But that convenience and speed has a downside… and that’s a growing tedency to fire-off quick, ill-conceived, badly written and poorly thought out messages that reflect badly on you as an individual, your department, or worse, the entire organisation you work for. E-mail ettiquette is straightforward, but is often overlooked in our haste to get the message sent.

You ignore good e-mail etiquette at your peril: your message, your reputation, and even your job could be at stake.

Examples abound of employees being disciplined or even dismissed for improper use of work e-mail, not to mention the countless millions lost to businesses every year through wasted time, resources and lost orders because of poor e-mail communications.

Good e-mail etiquette costs nothing but can be worth a lot to your career and the organisation you work for. Here are some quick tips for brushing up yours:

• Know your subject: never leave the subject field of an e-mail message blank — people use subjects to scan their inbox quickly for important messages. Make yours brief and to the point, letting the recipient know what your message is about before they open it.
• Say hello and goodbye: use an appropriate greeting to open your e-mail, and a polite closing statement. These don’t necessarily have to follow the formal rules of a business letter, but including some form of hello and goodbye is good business manners.
• Use the proper case and punctuation: don’t type your messages in all capitals or in all lower case characters. Doing so makes it more difficult to read and makes your communication appear sloppy. Normal capitalisation rules apply… use them! The same goes for punctuation.
• Easy on the formatting: refrain from using multiple fonts, different text and background colours and fancy HTML in your business e-mails — leave that to the marketing team. Use straightforward text and only apply basic formatting (like bullet point lists, titles, etc.) where it adds to the clarity of your message. As a rule of thumb stick to plain text messages wherever possible.
• Short and to the point: make every e-mail as short and direct as possible. People receive tens or even hundreds of messages in their inbox every day… be polite and courteous, but stick to the point and don’t over-elaborate.
• Who really needs to see it?: only send your e-mail to recipients who genuinely need to read your message. Avoid copying Joe Blogs in on your messages "just in case".
• Respect privacy: when it is necessary to send your message to a group of recipients, remember that unless they all know each other their e-mail addresses are personal information. If you use the To of CC field everyone you send the message to will see everyone else’s address. Consider using the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field instead to keep everyone’s address private. Also be careful if you’re including telephone numbers or other potentially private contact details in the body of a group e-mail.
• Don’t sent it straight away: although it’s tempting to send a message immediately, remember once it’s gone there’s no stopping it. Take a few minutes to re-read what you’ve written, make sure your message is clear polite, professional and to the point.

There are plenty of other tips out there to help you write more effective business e-mails, but these basics will help get you started. The golden rule is to be as polite and well mannered in your e-mail as you would be in person, and ask yourself if your business e-mails are of a standard that you’d be happy to receive yourself.

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