INTRODUCTION: 

WHY DO WE REQUIRE AN EMAIL GUIDE?

In this day and age where most businesses operate on a global basis with teams of people scattered across every corner of the planet, written communications—particularly emails—have become an essential part of their operations.

—Cecile Scaros[i]

According to a recent report by Radicati, email remains the most prevalent electronic communication medium for businesses and consumers alike.[ii] This reliance on email has developed over the past four decades. Despite the impressive rise of social media, a best-selling author on email marketing, Arthur Middleton Hughes, echoes the widely held sentiment that “Email remains King.” [iii]  Most significantly, HubSpot Research concludes that 86% of professionals still prefer to use email when communicating for business purposes.[iv]

While email may well be the dominant medium for communication today, it is by no means problem-free. Ryan Holmes, co-founder and CEO of Hootsuite, asserts, “Email is familiar, it’s comfortable, it’s easy to use, but it might just be the biggest killer of time and productivity in the office today.”[v] Best-selling author, keynote speaker, and economist Noreena Hertz writes, “Email is having an increasingly pernicious effect. Not only is it having a perceptible effect on productivity, it's skewing what it is we focus on. The immediate increasingly crowds out the important.”[vi] Furthermore, according to award-winning speaker Colin D. Ellis, “email is both essential and incredibly annoying. While we can’t do without it, many of us aren’t using it the right way.”[vii]

A large and growing body of research on email establishes that successful and productive corporations require efficient, well-written, and legally sound email communication. Yet many companies are not meeting these requirements. Indeed, national organizations like the American Management Corporation express concerns that many new employees do not fulfil the  expectations of having excellent written email skills.[viii] There is a resounding cry that email practices could, and indeed, should, be better. Email specialist, blogger, and business writer Jocelyn K. Glei, in an audiobook designed to “repair our relationship with email,” describes email as “[A] love-hate relationship. Email is broken or, more precisely, email has broken us, on a regular basis it inspires hatred, guilt, anxiety, and despair…and yet we know it is a useful and necessary part of our everyday lives.”[ix] This guidebook sets out to ‘fix’ our relationship with email.

Bad Emails are Costly

Communication means more than mutual understanding and is  only effective when the message is both understood and acted upon. Research has long established that ineffective communication leads to a loss of profit, time, opportunity, and customer relationships.[x] Specifically, poor email communication slows down business, delays orders, results in mistakes, and decreases productivity while increasing labour and supervisory costs. Indeed, email problems can be costly in terms of lost time, misunderstandings, increased stress, and reduced productivity.

According to Yahoo! Finance News, “collectively, North American workers spend nearly 75 billion hours in email a year at a cost of over 1.7 trillion US dollars.” The news article asks, “what if we could shift just 15% of that time and money towards role-specific tasks – the things that help our businesses grow?”[xi]The answer to the question requires a deliberate effort to develop our email communication and handling skills.

 Poor communication skills can negatively impact businesses in a range of ways. According to language and pedagogy expert Bethany Aull and English language professor Laura Aull, second-rate communication can “tarnish a brand image, cause ineffective or wrongful decision making, and lead to misunderstandings, and mismanagement.”[xii] Employers expect new employees to have considerable communication skills, including excellent email writing, even if these skills are insinuated or not explicitly stated.[xiii] If employees fall short in this category, it won’t take long before companies realize that email can adversely affect productivity if we let it.[xiv]

The media reports increasing instances of the damage emails can cause legally, socially, culturally, and politically – as well as for health care costs due to email stress. [xv] It becomes more and more apparent that email practices require overhauling. This guidebook aims to help address these problems with emails, allowing professionals to take stock and evaluate their communication strengths and weaknesses.

Email Use is on the Rise

To be an efficient communication tool, email should be streamlined. Yet all too often, emails are marred by poor grammar, plagued by too much information, and made unprofessional by an inappropriate tone, or they create inefficiency by overuse. The disadvantages of email have led some authors like Cal Newport, associate professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, to argue, “A world without email would be a better one.”[xvi] Statistics, however, reveal such a world is unlikely to exist in the next several years. Instead, the prediction is that email users will increase to almost 4.5 billion by 2024 from 4 billion in 2020. [xvii] Thus, three-quarters of the world’s population will use email.

Given that email is here to stay, it is worth investing some time to learn how to do it right. This guidebook provides up-to-date email training in plain language and offers solutions to restore streamlined efficiency to professional emails – a central skill in today’s workplace.

A Guide to This Book

            In this guidebook, I first make a case for the significance of email training and explain why I undertook to put this guide together. I look at the value of netiquette as a fundamental tool for email communication and  at the reasons why email standards are low. Next, I propose an “ideal” email scenario that depicts a model of efficient email practice. I then mine netiquette and other literature to identify, describe, and demonstrate how to avoid 38 bad habits that reduce the effectiveness of emails, and I identify areas of email practice that need improvement. I lay out these habits in order from the subject line to the sig, including common tone, style, and grammar problems, and I offer step-by-step instructions on how to fix these bad habits. 

Emails also play a crucial role in creating and maintaining business relationships, both locally and globally. I next focus on improving tone and social presence in business communication and discuss the importance of cultural and emotional intelligence in business emails. In the final chapter, I suggest effective and practical strategies for managing email inboxes to reduce email and information overload. In short, I offer a set of best practices to assist in motivating employees and managers to develop their email competence further.

My conclusion brings together lessons from these chapters. It discusses how readers can use this guidebook to move forward, experience less email-related stress, and have a sense of order when processing and managing the many incoming emails they receive daily. For convenience, I have included summaries of each chapter after the conclusion.

The Aims of This Book

The main aim of the guidebook is to help professionals vastly improve their overall experience with email writing and handling in order to feel better about the role email plays in their lives. In addition, I encourage professionals to establish good email writing habits that demonstrate their credibility and enhance their reputation. I provide the tools necessary to transform the experience of email writing from a “drain into a gain.”[xviii]

Overall, this guide emphasizes the mechanics of writing first-class emails. It also teaches professionals and laypersons how to become stronger communicators and helps instruct them to make better communication medium choices. As mentioned, it also provides better methods of managing incoming emails and inboxes. By adopting these email practices, you will accomplish the following goals:

·       Write with more confidence, clarity, and precision.

·       Make a stressful feature of the job—writing emails—more enjoyable.

·       Better understand the main communication mediums and how to use them for improved results.

·       Create a better image of yourself and your workplace by writing sound, culturally appropriate, and well-written emails that relay professionalism, understanding, and finesse.

·       Better understand the needs of your recipients and learn how to build and sustain good business relationships with them.

·       Manage your inbox efficiently and check incoming emails at scheduled times.

Professionals and laypersons alike will benefit from this guide to well-written emails. This book is not simply for academics or business practitioners but also for specialists and non-specialists in various fields. By highlighting the main problems and solutions associated with professional email writing today, as outlined by a wealth of international cross-disciplinary sources, I aim to assist managers, employees, and others to achieve personal and professional growth: to build and maintain quality relationships with partners, colleagues, managers, stakeholders, suppliers, internal teams, investors, and customers.

Considering how many emails professionals and laypersons write each day to maintain quality relationships, it is worth investing some time in developing the critical skill of email writing. Your reputation and your company’s reputation depend on it. As Barbara Wallraff, editor and columnist for the Boston Globe, emphasizes, 

People jump to all kinds of conclusions about you when they read documents you have written. They decide, for instance, how smart, how creative, how well organized, how trustworthy, and how considerate you are. …once they have made up their minds, it is hard to get them to see you differently. 

As Wallraff suggests, “it takes serious work on the receiving end to undo a bad reputation,” so it is better not to develop one in the first place.[xix] This guidebook will help improve your writing and communication skills so that you need not worry about people judging you badly based on your writing. Following the best practices offered here, step-by-step, will greatly improve your email writing abilities and help you achieve the excellent 

[i] Quoted in Helen Sword, The Writer’s Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 11.

[ii] The Radicati Group, “Email Statistics Report, 2020-2024,” https://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Email_Statistics_Report,_2020-2024_Executive_Summary.pdf. The Radicati Group provides quantitative and qualitative research on email, security, instant messaging, social networking, information archiving, regulatory compliance, wireless technologies, unified communications, and more. It delivers detailed worldwide market size, installed base and forecast information, as well as detailed country breakouts for all technology areas it covers. 

[iii]Arthur Middleton Hughes, “Why Email Marketing Is King,” Harvard Business Review, August 21, 2012, https://hbr.org/2012/08/why-email-marketing-is-king.

[iv] “101 Email Marketing Statistics Every Marketer Should Know,” January 18, 2022, https://www.industryselect.com/blog/email-marketing-statistics-for-b2b-success.

[v] Ryan Holmes, “Email is the New Pony Express – and it’s Time to put it Down,” fastcompamy.com, accessed March 10, 2021, https://www.fastcompany.com/3002170/email-new-pony-express-and-its-time-put-it-down. See also Ray Allison, “Email Overload Is Killing the UK’s Economic Productivity,” Computer Weekly, August 4, 2019, 23–26.

[vi] Noreen Hertz, “Wise Quotes and Wise Sayings,” Wisesayings.com, accessed Mar 10, 2022, https://www.wisesayings.com/email-quotes/.

[vii] Colin D. Ellis, “Stop. Does That Message Really Need to Be an Email?” Harvard Business Review, March 30, 2021, https://hbr.org/2021/03/stop-does-that-message-really-need-to-be-an-email.

[viii] Bethany Aull and Laura Aull, “Write a Greeting for Your Email Here: Principles for Assessing Interpersonal Workplace Email Communication,” The Journal of Writing Analytics 5 (2021): 221.

[ix] Jocleyn K. Glei, Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done (Kindle, 2016).

[x] Maryann Piotrowski, Effective Business Writing: Strategies and Suggestions (New York: Harper and Row, 1989).

[xi] “Contatta Infographic Reveals Staggering Cost of Business Email,” https://finance.yahoo.com/news/contatta-infographic-reveals-staggering-cost-150000169.html

[xii] Aull and Aull, “Write a Greeting,” 246.

[xiii] Aull and Aull, “Write a Greeting,” 246.

[xiv] Dmitri Leonov, “8 Tips for Managing Your Inbox,” Tryshift.Com (blog), accessed March 10, 2022., https://tryshift.com/blog/tips-tricks/tips-for-managing-your-inbox/.

[xv] See for example Maura Thomas, “Protecting Company Culture Means Having Rules for Email,” Harvard Business Review, September 17, 2018, https://hbr.org/2018/09/protecting-company-culture-means-having-rules-for-email.

[xvi] Cal Newport, A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload, (n.p.: Penguin Random House, 2021), Kindle.

[xvii] The Radicati Group, “Email Statistics Report,” 1.

[xviii] Shamel Addas, Alain Pinsonneault, and Gerald C. Kane, “Converting Email from a Drain into a Gain,” Harvard Business Review, July 1, 2018: 16.

[xix] Barbara Wallraff, “Improve Your Writing to Improve Your Credibility,” Harvard Business Review, July 29, 2015, https://hbr.org/2015/07/improve-your-writing-to-improve-your-credibility.