Electronic mail, widely known as “e-mail” or just “email,” is by volume the most popular written communication channel in the history of human civilization. With emails being so cheap and easy to send on desktop and laptop computers, as well as on mobile phones and tablets, a staggering 280 billion emails are sent globally per day (Radicati, 2017)—that’s over a hundred trillion per year. Most are for business purposes because email is a flexible channel ideal for anything from short, routine information shares, requests, and responses the length of a text, to important formal messages delivering the content that letters and memos used to handle. The ability to send a message to one person or as many people as you have addresses for, integrate with calendars for scheduling meetings and events, send document attachments, and send automatic replies makes email the most versatile communication channel in the workplace.

The fact that 3.2 million emails are typically sent every second doesn’t mean that quality is a non-issue for email. Because it has, to some extent, replaced mailed letters for formal correspondence, emails related to important occasions such as applying for and maintaining employment must be impeccably well written. Your email represents you in your physical absence, as well as the company you work for if that’s the case, so it must provide the needed content and be appropriately structured and well-written.

First, ensure that you really need an email to represent you because emailing merely to avoid speaking in person or calling by phone can do more harm than good. If an email is necessary, however, then it must display the qualities listed in the previous paragraph. As people who make decisions about your livelihood, the employers and clients you email can be highly judgmental about the quality of your writing — to them, it’s an indication of your professionalism, attention to detail, education, and even intelligence. The writing quality in a single important email can be the difference between getting hired and getting fired or remaining unemployed.

Let’s say, for instance, that you get an email from a customer who has been looking for a company to do a custom job. This means he/she has been emailing other companies with the same inquiry. Let’s say also that your competitors offer similar services at similar prices and are similarly reviewed positively online. With everything else being equal, the quality of the email responses received may be the deciding factor for that customer. Responding to the customer quickly gives you an advantage because you show that you can get things done promptly. If your email is also well written in a professional style (see §2.3  for the 6 Cs) and error-free in every way due to effective editing and proofreading, you stand a much better chance of getting the contract.

Comparing this with another company’s email that came a few days later, with multiple writing errors in it, the customer will likely go with the company that wrote the better email. Even though the quality of communication doesn’t necessarily guarantee quality of work in the product or service a company provides, customers will assume a connection. Indeed, the quality of communication does speak to work ethic and attention to detail.

The customer’s basis for judgment here is that if a company’s communications are good, it must be because they’ve hired a customer service rep dedicated to responding to people. This means they have the money to do so, which means they’re successful, which must be because they do a good job, which means they’ll do a good job on what the customer wants them to do. We must all try to make a similarly strong impression in any situation where the quality of email matters. Let’s turn our attention, then, to the ten aspects you must consider when sending an important email — in the order they appear in the email (from top to bottom) — and then consider a few more points of caution.

Before delving into this in detail, however, let’s review the advantages, disadvantages, and occasions for using email on channel selection.

Table 4.1 Excerpt: Email Pros, Cons, and Proper Use

4.1.1: Email Address

Just as with physical (paper) mail, the first thing you see when an email arrives in your inbox is the identity of the sender. The address determines immediately how you feel about that email—excited, uninterested, curious, angry, hopeful, scared, or just obliged to read it. Your email address will create similar impressions on those you email depending on your relationship to them. It’s therefore important that you send from the right email address.

If you work for a company, obviously you must use your company email address for company business. Customers expect it. Bear in mind that in a legal and right-to-privacy sense, you don’t own these emails. If they exist on a company server, company administrators can read any of them if they are investigating a breach of company policy or criminal activity (Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, 2010). This means that you must be careful not to write anything in an email that could compromise your employability.

If you are writing on your own behalf for any business or job-application purposes, it’s vital that you have a respectable-looking email address. Using a college or university email is a good idea because it proves that you indeed are attending or attended a post-secondary institution when you’ve made that claim in your application. If your school email address has expired, however, it’s worth starting an account that has a straightforward address showing your name. If your name is Justin Trudeau, for instance, your ideal email address would simply be justin.trudeau@ with one of the major email providers like Gmail or Outlook/Hotmail. Of course, everybody knows that all of the straightforward firstname.lastname@ addresses have been taken, so there’s nothing wrong with variations that include middle names or initials and small numbers as long as they don’t get too big, such as more than 25 characters.

What’s fundamentally important, however, is that you do not use your teenage joke email address. If you have one of these, it may have scored some points with friends back in high school, but now that you’re an adult, it will only do irreparable harm to your employability prospects if you’re using it for job applications. Any potential employer or other professional who gets an email from star6969@whatever.com, speedball.playa@hotmail.com, or crazy.unicorn.girl@yahoo.com is going to delete it without even opening it.

Also, forget about clinging to the fantasy of having only one email address to deal with. Just as your demeanour and language style changes in social, family, and professional contexts, you must likewise hold multiple email accounts—one for work, one for school, and one for personal matters. Each of the 3.8 billion email users in the world has an average of 1.7 email accounts (Radicati, 2017). It’s likely that you will have more than three throughout your life and retire accounts as you move on from school and various workplaces. If you can manage it, you can set up forwarding so that you can run multiple accounts out of one, except where company or institutional policy requires that you work entirely within a designated email provider or client.

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4.1.2: Timestamp & Punctuality

The timestamp that comes with each email means that punctuality matters and raises the question of what the expectations are for acceptable lag time between you receiving an email and returning an expected response. Of course, you can reply as soon as possible as you would when texting and have a back-and-forth recorded in a thread. What if you need more time, however?

Though common wisdom used to be that the business standard is to reply within 24 hours, the availability of email on the smartphones that almost everyone carries in their pockets has reduced that expectation to a few hours. Recent research shows that half of email responses in business environments in fact comes within two hours (Vanderkam, 2016). Some businesses have internal policies that demand even quicker responses because business moves fast. If you can get someone’s business sooner than the competition because you reply sooner, then of course you’re going to make every effort to reply right away. Of course, the actual work you do can delay your email responses, but you must prioritize incoming work in order to stay in business.

What if you can’t reply within the expected number of hours? The courteous course of action is to reply as soon as possible with a brief message saying that you’ll be turning your attention to this matter as soon as you can. You don’t have to go into detail about what’s delaying you unless it’s relevant to the topic at hand, but courtesy requires that you at least give a timeline for a fuller response and stick to it.

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4.1.3: Subject Line Title

The next most important piece of information you see when scanning your inbox is the email’s subject line. Busy professionals who receive dozens of emails each day prioritize their workload and response efforts based largely on the content of the subject lines appearing in their inboxes. Because it acts as a title for the email, the subject line should accurately summarize its topic in 3-7 words. (This is the ideal length, but never sacrifice clarity to make the subject line short.)

The wordcount range here is important because your subject line shouldn’t be so vague that its one or two words will be misleading, nor so long and detailed that its eight-plus words will be cut off by your inbox layout. Most details about specific times and places, for instance, should really be in the message itself rather than in the subject line (see Table 6.1.3 below). Also, avoid using words in your subject line that might make your email look like spam. A subject line such as Hello or Interesting offer might appear to be a hook to get you to open an email that contains a malware virus. This may prompt the recipient to delete it to be on the safe side, or their email provider may automatically send it to the junkmail box, which people rarely check.

Table 4.1.3: Subject Line Length

Stylistically, notice that appropriately sized subject lines typically abbreviate where they can and avoid articles (the, a, an), capitalization beyond the first word (except for proper nouns).

Whatever you do, don’t leave your subject line blank! Even if you’re just sending a quick email with an attachment to yourself and do not include other content in the message, the subject line text will be essential to your ability to retrieve that file later. You might find yourself desperately needing that file months or even years later because the laptop it was saved on was stolen or damaged beyond repair, which you couldn’t have predicted at the time you sent it. A search in your email provider for words matching those you used in the subject line will quickly help you find the email in question. Without words in the subject line or message, however, you’ll have no choice but to guess at when you sent the email and waste time going through page after page of sent-folder messages looking for it. A few seconds spent writing a good subject line can save you hours of frustrating searches later.

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4.1.4: Opening Salutation & Recipient Selection

The opening salutation of an email indicates the name of the receiver but also reveals the level of formality of the email in question. As you can see in Table 6.1.4 below, opening with Dear [Full Name] or Greetings, [Full Name]: strikes an appropriately respectful tone when writing to someone for the first time in a professional context. When greeting someone you’ve emailed before, Hello, [First name]: maintains a semiformal tone. When you’re more casually addressing a familiar colleague, a simple Hi [First name], is just fine.

Table 4.1.4: Opening Salutation Examples

Notice that the punctuation includes a comma after the greeting word and a colon after their name for formal and semiformal occasions following. Informal greetings, however, relax these rules by omitting the comma after the greeting word and replacing the colon with a comma. Don’t use two commas, though — Hi, Jeremy, appears too crowded with commas.

Depending on the nature of the message, you can use alternative greeting possibilities. If you’re thanking someone for information they’ve sent you, you can do so right away in the greeting; e.g., Many thanks for the contact list, Maggie. When your email exchange turns into a back-and-forth thread involving several emails, it’s customary to drop the salutation altogether and treat each message as if it were a text message even in formal situations.

Formality also dictates whether you use the recipient’s first name or full name in your salutation. If you’re writing to someone you know well or responding to an email where the sender signed off at the bottom using their first name, that means you may address the sender by the first name in your response. If you’re addressing someone formally for the first time, however, you may want to strike an appropriately respectful tone by using the receiver’s full name. If you’re addressing a group, a simple Hello, all: or Hello, team: will do.

Be careful when selecting recipients, however. First, spell their name correctly because email addresses often have non-standard combinations of name fragments and numbers; any typos will result in the server bouncing your email back to you as being unsent. Waiting before entering their name in the recipient or “To” field is also wise in case you accidentally hit the Send button before you finish drafting your email. If you prematurely send an email, a quick follow-up apologizing for the confusion and the completed message is the best damage control you can do, but it requires immediate action. Another preventative measure is to compose a message offline, such as in an MS Word or simple Notepad document devoid of formatting, then copy and paste it into the email field when you’re ready to send.

If you have a primary recipient in mind but want others to see the message, you can include them in the CC (carbon copy) line. If confidentiality requires that recipients shouldn’t see one another’s addresses, BCC [blind carbon copy] them instead. Be selective with whom you CC, however. It’s good to keep your manager in the loop, of course, but you may want to do this only at the beginning and the end of a project’s many email exchanges. Your manager will appreciate that things are under way and wrapping up but may get annoyed to receive a copy of every little mundane back-and-forth throughout the process. If in doubt, speak with your manager about their preferences.

Never “reply all” so that everyone included in the “To” and “CC” lines can see your reply unless your response includes information that everyone absolutely must see. If your manager sends some information to all 80 people in your department, for instance, your reply-all response that just acknowledges receipt with an “OK, thanks!” — which is unnecessary in the first place — will anger 79 people who expected to see valuable information. If the first email was about a departmental meeting time though the location was yet to be determined, but you now have that information because you did the booking, of course you would reply all to provide that necessary follow-up.

Concerning email security: No matter whom you select as the primary or secondary (CC) recipients of your email, always assume that your email may be forwarded on to other people, including some people you might not have wanted to show it to. Just because you’ve selected recipients doesn’t necessarily make your email a private channel. You have no control over whether the recipients forward it to others, what the server administrators do with it (legally or not), or if your account or the server is hacked. If your email contains any legally sensitive content, it can even be retrieved from the server storing it with a warrant from law enforcement. A good rule to follow is to never send an email that you would be embarrassed by if it were read by your boss, your family, or a jury. No technical barriers can truly prevent it from falling into their hands.

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4.1.5: Message Opening

Most emails will be direct-approach messages where you get right to the point in the opening sentence immediately below the opening salutation. As we saw in §3.1 on message organization, the direct-approach pattern does the reader a favour by not burying the main point under a pile of contextual background. If you send a busy professional on a treasure hunt for your main point — a request for information, for example– don’t blame them if they don’t find it and don’t provide the information you asked for. They might have given up before they got there or missed it when skimming, as busy people tend to do. By stating in the opening exactly what you want the recipient to do, however, you increase your chances of achieving that goal.

Table 4.1.5: Direct- vs. Indirect-approach Email Openings

Indirect-approach emails should be rare and only sent in extenuating circumstances. Using email to deliver bad news or address a sensitive topic can be seen as a cowardly way of avoiding difficult situations that should be dealt with in person or, if the people involved are too far distant, at least by phone. Other circumstances that might force you to use the indirect approach for emails include the following:

• Needing to use persuasive techniques
• Having no other means of contacting the recipient
• Needing to get the email exchange in writing in case the situation escalates and must be handled as evidence by higher authorities
• Needing to deliver a large number of bad-news messages without having the time or resources to individually customize each, such as when you are sending rejection notices to job applicants (see the sample indirect opening in Table 4.1.5 above); out of expedience, it’s understandable if these are boiler-plate responses

In such cases, the indirect approach means that the opening should use buffer strategies to ease the recipient into the bad news or set the proper context for discussing the sensitive topic.

Otherwise, your email must pass the first-screen test, which is that everything the recipient needs to see is visible in the opening without forcing them to scroll further down for it. Before pressing the Send button, put yourself in your reader’s shoes and consider whether your message passes the first-screen test. If not, and if you have no good reason to take the indirect approach, then re-organize your email message by moving (copying, cutting, and pasting, or ctrl. + C, ctrl. + X, ctrl. + v) its main point up to make it the opening of your message.

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4.1.6: Message Body

Emails long enough to divide into paragraphs follow the three-part message organization (outlined in §3.1) where the message body supports the opening main point with explanatory details such as background information justifying an information request. With brevity being so important in emails, keeping the message body concise, with no more information than recipients need to do their job, is extremely important to the message’s success. The message body therefore doesn’t always need fully developed three-part paragraphs. In fact, one-sentence paragraphs (single spaced with a line of space between each) and bullet-point lists are fine. If your message grows in length beyond the first screen, document design features such as bold headings help direct readers to the information they need. If your message gets any larger, moving it into an attached document is better than writing several screens of large paragraphs.

Also keep email messages brief by sticking to one topic per email. If you have a second topic you must cover with the same recipient(s), sending a separate email about it can potentially save you time if you need to retrieve that topic content later. If the subject line doesn’t describe the topic you’re looking for because it was a second or third topic you added after the one summarized in the subject line, finding that hidden message content will probably involve opening several emails. A subject line must perfectly summarize all of an email’s contents to be useful for archiving and retrieval, so sticking to one topic per email will ensure both brevity and archive retrieval efficiency.

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4.1.7: Message Closing

An email closing usually includes action information such as direction on what to do with the information in the message and deadlines for action and response. If your email message requests that its nine recipients each fill out a linked Doodle.com survey to determine a good meeting time, for instance, you would end by saying, Please fill out the Doodle survey by 4pm Friday, May 18, so I can email everyone the meeting time by 10 a.m. on Monday, May 21. If the message doesn’t call for action details, some closing thought (e.g., I’m happy to help. Please drop me a line if you have any questions) ends it without giving the impression of being rudely abrupt. Goodwill statements, such as Thanks again for your feedback on our customer service, are necessary especially in emails involving gratitude.

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4.1.8: Closing Salutation

A courteous closing to an email involves a combination of a pleasant sign-off word or phrase and your first name. As with the opening salutation, closing salutation possibilities depend on the nature of the message and where you want to position it on the formality spectrum, as shown in Table 6.1.8 below.

Table 4.1.8: Closing Salutation Examples

Your first email to someone in a professional context should end with a more formal closing salutation. Later emails to the same person can use the appropriate semiformal closing salutation for the occasion. If you’re on friendly, familiar terms with the person but still want to include email formalities, an informal closing salutation can work as a confirmation of that friendly rapport. Notice in Table 6.1.8 that you capitalize only the first word in the closing salutation and add a comma at the end.

Including your first name after the closing salutation ends in a friendly way, as if to say, “Let’s be on a first-name basis” if you weren’t already, greenlighting your recipients to address you by your first name in their reply. In your physical absence, your name at the end is also a way of saying, like politicians chiming in at the end of campaign ads, “I’m [name] and I approve this message.” It’s a stamp of authorship. Omitting it gives the impression of being abrupt and too busy or important to take a second for formal niceties.

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4.1.9: E-signature

Not to be confused with an electronic version of your handwritten signature, the e-signature that automatically appears at the very bottom of your email is like the business card you would hand to someone when networking. Every professional should have one. Like a business card, the e-signature includes all relevant contact information. At the very least, the e-signature should include the details given in Table 6.1.9 below.

Table 4.1.9: E-signature Part

Depending on the individual’s situation, variations on the e-signature include putting your educational credentials after your name (e.g., MBA) on the same line and professional role on the second line, especially if it’s a long one, and the company address on one line or two. Also, those working for a company usually include the company logo to the left of their e-signature. Some instead (or additionally) add their profile picture, especially if they work independently, though this isn’t always advisable because it may open you to biased reactions. Other professionals add links to their social media profiles such as LinkedIn and the company’s Facebook and Twitter pages. For some ideas on what your e-signature could look like, image-search “email e-signature” in your internet browser’s search engine.

If you haven’t already, set up your e-signature in your email provider’s settings or options page. In Gmail, for instance, click on the settings cog icon at the top right, select Settings from the dropdown menu, scroll down the General tab, and type your e-signature in the Signature field. Make absolutely sure that all of the details are correct and words spelled correctly. You don’t want someone to point out that you’ve spelled your professional role incorrectly after months of it appearing in hundreds of emails.

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4.1.10: Attachments

Email’s ability to help you send and receive documents makes it an indispensable tool for any business. Bear in mind a few best practices when attaching documents:

• Always announce an attachment in an email message with a very brief description of its contents. For instance, Please find attached the minutes from today’s departmental meeting might be all you write between the opening and closing salutations.
• Never leave a message blank when attaching a document in an email to someone else. Your message should at least be like the one given above. Of course, including a message is up to you if you’re sending yourself an attachment as an alternative to using a dedicated cloud storage service like Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive. Even if it’s just for yourself, however, at least including a subject line identifying the nature of the attachment will make locating the file easier months or even years later.
• Ensure that your attachment size, if it’s many megabytes (MB), is still less than your email provider’s maximum allowable for sending and receiving. Gmail and Yahoo, for instance, allow attachments up to 25MB, whereas Outlook/Hotmail allow only 10MB attachments. However, files that are gigabytes (GB) large can be shared by using email to permit access to them where they’re hosted in cloud storage services such as Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, and many others that have varying limits from 5GB free strorage to 10TB for paid storage (Khanna, 2017).
• Always check to ensure that you’ve attached a document, as part of your editing process. It shows that you lack attention to detail if your recipient responds to remind you to attach the document. Some of the more sophisticated email providers will remind you to do this as soon as you hit the Send button if you’ve mentioned an attachment in your message but haven’t actually attached it. If you get into the habit of relying on this feature in one of your email providers (e.g., your personal Gmail account) but are on your own in others (e.g., your work or school email provider), the false sense of security can hurt you at some point when using the latter.

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4.1.11: Before Sending Your Email

Before hitting the Send button, follow through on the entire writing and editing process by using evaluation, revision, and proofreading. Put yourself in your reader’s position and assess whether you’ve achieved the purpose you set out to achieve. Evaluate also if you’ve struck the appropriate tone and formality. If you’re aware that your tone is too angry, for instance, cool down by focusing on other business for a while. When you come back to your email draft the next day, you will usually find that you don’t feel as strongly about what you wrote the day before. Review the advice about netiquette in §6.2, then replace the angry words with more carefully chosen expressions to craft a more mature response before hitting the Send button. You’ll feel much better about this in the end than receiving the threat-heavy response your angry email would have prompted had you gone through with sending it.

After revising the message, always proofread it. In any professional situation, but especially in important ones related to gaining and keeping employment, any typo or error related to spelling, grammar, or punctuation can cost you dearly. A poorly written email is insulting because it effectively says to the recipient, “You weren’t important enough for me to take the time to ensure that this email was properly written.” Worse, poor writing can cause miscommunication if it is unclear and it forces the reader to struggle to figure out what the writer meant to say. If the recipient acts on misinterpretations, and others base their actions on that action, you can soon find that even small errors can have damaging ripple effects that infuriate everyone involved.

Table 4.1.11: Editing a Poorly Written Information Request Email

The poorly written draft has the look of a hastily and angrily written text to a “frenemy.” An email to a superior, however, calls for a much more formal, tactful, courteous, and apologetic approach. The undifferentiated wall of text that omits or botches standard email parts such as opening and closing salutations is the first sign of trouble. The lack of capitalization, poor spelling (e.g., councilor instead of counsellor), run-on sentences and lack of other punctuation such as apostrophes for contractions, as well as the inappropriate personal detail all suggest that the writer doesn’t take his/her studies seriously enough to deserve any favours. Besides tacking on a question at the end, one that could be easily answered by reading the syllabus, the writer is ultimately unclear about the purpose of the email. If the writer wants an explanation for the failing grade, that should be stated upfront. The rudeness of the closing is more likely to enrage the recipient than to ensure a quick and detailed response.

The improved version stands a much better chance of a sympathetic response. It corrects the problems of the first draft, starting with properly framing the message with expected formal email parts. It benefits from a more courteous tone in a message that frontloads a clear and polite request for information in the opening. The supporting detail in the message body and apologetic closing suggest that the student is well aware of how to communicate like a professional to achieve a particular goal.

After running such a quality-assurance check on your email, your final step before sending it should involve protecting yourself against losing it to a technical glitch. Get in the habit of copying your email message text (ctrl. + A, ctrl. + C) just before hitting the Send button, then checking your Sent folder immediately to confirm that the email sent properly. If your message vanished due to some random malfunction, as can happen occasionally, immediately open a blank MS Word or Notepad document and paste the text there (ctrl. + V) to save it. That way, you don’t have to waste five minutes rewriting the entire message after you solve the connectivity issues or whatever else caused the glitch.

For similar views on email best practices, see Guffey, Loewy, and Almonte (2016, pp. 90-97), which furnished some of the information given above.

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