Five Reasons To Improve Your Email Writing Skills
Email has become the most important vehicle for business communication. When done well, email messages can increase sales and goodwill or communicate essential information. But poorly written messages can lead to misunderstandings, damage relationships or worse: They won’t get read at all.
1. Readers judge email as they do any business communication. Email is more than a way to send an attachment or schedule a meeting; it’s more or less replaced the internal memorandum and the letter mailed to clients or customers. Just because you spent little time on composing the message doesn’t mean the reader forgives improper grammar, misspelled words or confusing thoughts!
2. Save time. Speaking of time, the average business user can send more than 100 emails a day. Learning tips to improve email writing and accuracy can cut time without sacrificing quality. For example, it might take time to set up your email spellchecker or review before hitting send, but isn’t that better than rewriting a message filled with errors? Learning to quickly generate meaningful, high-quality messages is essential to people who send and receive hundreds or thousands of messages a week.
3. Show you paid attention. Sending email on the fly shows a lack of attention to work and lack of respect for the recipient. Sure, everyone makes mistakes, but email messages that don’t respond to a question or point or that contain abbreviations and poor writing signal to the reader that the communication exchange is unimportant.
4. Excellent email writing can open the door to opportunity. I’ve talked about plenty of reasons to avoid problems with poorly written emails, but how about the advantage consistently high-quality email writing can offer? Employees might see opportunities for advancement open up, and businesses can use email as a tool for positive customer engagement when everyone in the group has savvy email writing skills.
5. Good writing matters less if recipients don’t read the message. Plenty of data support the value of tools to ensure that messages evoke a call to action. Learning to write effective subject lines is the first step to email writing success, since it usually prompts the first decision by a recipient – “Do I need to/care to open this message?” How the message flows and looks can keep readers engaged.
Improve your email writing skills with our tip cards, coaching, consulting and online courses. Call us at 425-485-3221 or check out our email writing training and services online.
For over 30 years, professionals have relied on Business Writing That Counts! to learn techniques to get promoted, close more deals, and save money through dramatically improved writing skills. The company’s dynamic online and on-site writing courses reduce writing time while delivering high-impact content and timesaving techniques. Visit www.businesswritingthatcounts.com for more information.
