Craft Emails with Your Audience in Mind

By Laura Creekmore (not an STC member)

If you asked me about my own communications preferences, I’d have a quick answer. I’m an introvert. I think best when I’m writing. I take a lot of notes as a result, and more importantly, when I want you to know something, my instinct is to send you an email, a text, or, if this is a business proposal, a long document.

Which you will likely never read.

When I started my professional life, we communicated through memos. Yes, email was around, but if you wanted to make a statement, or a commitment, you sent a memo. You formatted it in Microsoft Word, and for a while there, you printed it, initialed it, and mailed or faxed it. That paper part of the chain went away pretty quickly with the Internet, but we kept creating official memos in Word documents and sending them as email attachments. Many of us still do.

For several years now, I’ve been noticing that little communication happens via attachments anymore. In fact, when I email an attachment, I no longer expect people to read it. The attachment is an artifact, sometimes for official business records, and it might come into play later, but only if there’s an official, legal reason for it to do so (that is, if something has gone wrong). Instead, our real communication happens via emails, instant-messaging chats, and meetings. This is how decisions get made for many of us in the professional world.

Unfortunately, many of us (and I’ve certainly been guilty here for longer than I’d like to admit) still write as if someone’s going to read that 10-page proposal.

As I noticed these cultural changes, I began to change the way I communicate professionally, and you may want to as well. I’ve started thinking about my email recipients the way I would any other audience I communicate with. The more I do, the more I realize that I haven’t been serving my audience terribly well.

Here are some ideas that have changed the way I communicate via email.

Pay Attention to What Annoys You

My first insight: I realized that other people were annoying me with their communication habits. Things like replying to a long thread of emails with a "Yes" or "OK." Often, I’d have to wade back through multiple emails to figure out what problem we’d just solved, since this certainly wasn’t the only email thread I was participating in at any given time. Even worse, someone would forward me someone else’s email thread and say, "See below." Ack!

I also found that an email thread with just one other person could be frustrating. I would agree to meet someone for lunch. Back and forth about the day. The time. The location. Agreement. Wonderful. Until I was in my car, trying to remember the name of the restaurant so I could Google its street address and figure out the fastest way to get there during lunch-hour traffic. Odds were, all those emails in the thread weren’t available on my phone, just the last one or two. I began to resort to just calling or texting the person to ask where we were meeting. Inefficient at best, and it made me look scattered, or even late to lunch!

From these annoyances, I came up with my first principle: Finish a decision-making email thread with a summary of the decision. It’s simple, and usually makes that final email only one or two sentences longer.

Thanks, Pam. I look forward to seeing you on Thursday, Sept. 9, 2014, at the Cumberland Bistro (127 Main Street in Franklin) at 11:30am. I’m looking forward to catching up on your nonprofit project!

Wow, what a great email! Now, Pam and I can both find where and when we’re meeting, and even what we’ve planned to talk about. Without this summary, those details could be buried a dozen emails down, but now I’ve put all the details at the top, helping both of us.

Here’s another insight that came from my don’t-do-what-annoys-you epiphany. In every email you send, including replies, include both your email address and your cell phone number. Every single email.

Take a look through the emails you get today. How many of them include a signature? How many people include a cell phone number in their signature? Most of us use a cell phone number now for our primary communication. (Increasingly, more and more people use cell phones for all business communication.) But just because someone relies on a cell phone doesn’t mean they share that number with the rest of us.

When people first began to use cell phones for business, knowing someone’s cell phone number meant you were on the inside. It was often more closely guarded than a home phone number. Part of this was just a function of cost—cell phones cost more to use 20 years ago than landlines did.

Those days have been over for a long time. If you ever use your cell phone to take a work call or text, that number needs to be in every email you send. If it’s not, you may be annoying people every day, even if they don’t complain to you.

I have worked with people who only include signatures in emails they originate, not their replies, or only in their first email in a thread. This is often considered a space- and clutter-saving mechanism. But I’ve had too many partial email threads forwarded to me to endorse this practice. Many email programs also don’t actually show the email address in the header when you forward an email, or make it a live link, so if it’s not in your signature, I still don’t know how to reach you.

Be a Good Host

Here’s an email faux pas I still see nearly every day: people forward emails to others fairly carelessly, or they add new people to an email thread without letting anyone know what’s happening. Some bad things happen as a result:

• Sometimes people see information they weren’t meant to see. You may need Susie to OK one expenditure, but it may not be appropriate for her assistant to see the entire department budget that you’ve attached.
• People don’t realize who’s involved. When you add someone new to a thread partway through, others may not notice. They may say something inappropriate, or they may not realize Dan needs to be involved, and they’ll fail to copy him on an email they send later.
• New people added to emails may be confused. If there’s more than one email in the thread, odds are the new folks aren’t sure what’s going on.

And yet often, forwarding and adding members to a thread are the most efficient ways to handle a situation.

If you’re adding new people into an email chain partway through, remember to acknowledge them (especially so that everyone else realizes Dan is now included), and provide a short-paragraph summary of the question at hand.

Whether you’re adding or forwarding, provide your correspondents with the context they need to contribute effectively.

Consider Your Audience

Remember that you aren’t your audience. There are two takeaways here:

• You know what you’re thinking and all the context.
• You don’t know where they are or how busy they are going to be at the moment they receive your communication.

When I’m drafting a business email, I often start with the main point. I like to get right to it. I know I’m busy, and other people are, too, so I tell myself, let’s not waste any time! Here’s what these first-pass emails might look like:

I rarely send those emails.

The first thing I remind myself is that I need to affirm the other party’s work, and if any time has passed since their last missive to me, even their humanity. So I make a couple of additions:

Same message, way friendlier. Still short enough to read quickly on a phone, where I assume Sue will see it first.

I’ll pause here to say that my obsession with courtesy is partially cultural. I have lived my whole life in the American South, and this culture still prides itself on being courteous to others, even strangers. Other cultures don’t place as high a value on it. Efficiency might rank higher where you are, for instance. And if I’m being honest, efficiency is my preferred language—but I’ve learned that friendly + efficient gets me better results.

I have never made a misstep by building a deeper relationship with my colleagues. Acknowledging the humanity of your audience reflects well on you. Yes, we all want to get it done. But taking one sentence to acknowledge that Sue had a weekend and that I hope she didn’t have to spend it all working doesn’t interfere with getting to the finish line fast.

Being courteous needs to be authentic for you, though, and it has to feel real to your audience. At the same time, don’t be overly familiar. Always be professional. But be friendly.

When you think about your audience, think about where they are. I read almost all of my emails on both mobile and my laptop. Depending on what you know about your email and your audience, you may know where your message is likely to reach them (or maybe not).

If you don’t know, it’s a good idea to assume your audience is on mobile. They’ll have limited screen size. Formatting, images, and links may not look the same. Large files may become problematic or not be available. Make sure you explain the action you need, and the information your audience needs, near the top of the email.

Use Formatting and Structure to Get Your Point Across

The formatting tools in your email program can help you make your emails much more effective. For years, I didn’t use them at all, rarely even bolding anything in an email.

Just as I don’t use Comic Sans, I avoided formatting emails to distinguish myself from all those folks who were using hot pink, bold, 24-point type to emphasize something in their business emails. I finally realized: I didn’t need to throw out the useful formatting with the 24-point hot pink. Bold type conveys emphasis professionally. Use formatting and structure to make your emails easier to read and act upon.

Consider these tools your best weapons:

• Bold text (I use this most often for the most important point, or for the action I’d like my audience to take.)
• Bullet point lists (Use this instead of a long chunk of text, and your audience can read much faster.)

Formatting to avoid:

• Underlined text (People still assume this is a link—so it’s fine for links to be underlined.)
• Colored text (This gets stripped by many email programs. It generally works well inside a corporate system on Outlook, though. Just don’t assume anyone outside your own network will see the colors. Bold is sometimes stripped, but I have noticed this far less often than colors being stripped.)
• Too much bold (Suddenly nothing is noticeable.)
• Too many lists (Some narrative is almost always required for context.)

Remember that earlier email about lunch plans? Look how we can improve that email with better formatting and structure:

Now it’s easy for Pam or me to see at a glance what we need to know for lunch!

This Is an Art, But You Can Be a Great Artist

Business writing is its own kind of art. It’s not a flowery one—no need for extra adjectives and adverbs. Different emails and recipients will call for different communication tools. Before you press Send, ask yourself: What else does your audience need? Think about the audience and how you hope for them to respond. Have you given them everything they need to act quickly? Have you prevented common annoyances? Have you set your audience up for success?

Laura Creekmore is president of Creek Content, which consults with clients in health care and other complex industries on communications strategy. She speaks and trains frequently on content strategy, content marketing, and information architecture. Reach her at laura@creekcontent.com or on Twitter at @lauracreekmore.