Secrets of business email correspondence

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

We present you an article by Artem Turovets on the system of organizing business correspondence. This is not a set of "productivity super methods", not a lecture on email marketing. Artyom will simply share the experience of his company, where they tried to set up work with e-mail so that everyone was comfortable.

What is email? In the modern business world, these are:

• Your face. It is with the help of email that you can create a positive image in the eyes of the counterparty or ruin the first impression.
• Your work tool. A lot of communication with the outside world happens by email. Therefore, having a good command of this tool, you can greatly make your life easier.
• A powerful distraction. The outside world is trying to get you, distract and lead you astray via email.

From this point of view, let's look at working with e-mail. Let's start simple.

Letter design

I use the Mozilla Thunderbird mail client, so I will use it as an example. Let's create a new letter and go from top to bottom in the list of fields.

To whom. Copy. Hidden copy

Someone might not know, but Mozilla's "To" can be changed to "Cc" or "Bcc".

• To: we write the main addressee or several addressees separated by semicolons.
• Copy: we write to someone who should read the letter, but from whom we do not expect a response.
• Bcc: we write to the one who should read the letter, but should remain unknown to the rest of the recipients of the letter. It is especially suitable for mass mailing of business letters, for example, notifications.

Not right in mass mailing, specify recipients through the "Cc" or "To" fields. Several times a year I receive letters in which 50–90 addressees are listed in the “Cc” field. There is a violation of privacy. Not all of your recipients need to know who else you are working with on a similar topic. It's good if these are people you know each other. And if the list includes competing companies that do not know about each other? At the very least, you need to be ready for unnecessary explanations, at the maximum, for the termination of cooperation with one of them. Do not do like this.

Right send mass mailings to your own name, and put all recipients in the “Bcc” field.

Letter subject

The importance of the subject line is often written (sometimes sensibly) in their corporate blogs by professional mailing services. But there most often we are talking about sales letters, where the subject line solves the problem "email should be opened".

We are discussing daily business correspondence. Here the theme solves the problem "the letter and its author should be easily identified and then found." Moreover, your diligence will return to you in the form of the karma of numerous response letters, only with the prefixes Re: or Fwd, among which you will have to look for the desired letter on the topic.

Twenty letters is the volume of a one-day correspondence of a middle manager. I am not talking about entrepreneurs and business owners at all, their number of letters sometimes goes off scale for 200 or more per day. So again: don't send emails with an empty subject line.

So how to formulate your subject line correctly?

We in our "Sky" recommend in external letters to write in the subject: "Sky." In the internal - just the content of the subject line in three to five words without prefixes.

Mistake # 1: only the name of the company in the subject. For example, "Sky" and that's it. First, for sure you are not one of your company communicating with this counterparty. Secondly, this topic does not bring any meaning, because the name of your company is already visible from the address. Third, guess what your own mailbox will look like with this approach to correspondence? Something like this.

Is it convenient to search on topics like this?

Mistake # 2: a flashy, selling headline. It's great if you know how to write headlines like this. But is it appropriate to use these skills in business correspondence? Remember the purpose of the subject line of a business letter: not to sell, but to provide identification and search.

Not right	Right
Hurry up to buy axes at a reasonable price!	Commercial offer for the supply of axes
We must hurry up to check the percentages! Rodion is on his way!	For approval of the act of reconciliation on interest with Alena Ivanovna
ATTENTION! Porfiry Petrovich solved the secret of Raskolnikov, and will solve our problems	An offer from a consultant: psychological deduction

»

Text of the letter

There are many writing guides for different occasions. For example, a lot of useful things from, and other masters of the word. I advise you to read their articles at least to improve general literacy and improve the general style of writing.

In the process of writing a letter, we must consistently make several decisions.

A question of courtesy … At the beginning of the letter, you can blur in courtesies or even tenderness in the spirit of "My dear Rodya, for more than two months now, I haven't talked to you in writing, from which I myself suffered and did not even sleep another night thinking." It is very polite and very costly, both in terms of time to compose such an introduction, and to the time of the interlocutor to read it. This is a business correspondence, remember? Not an essay of the epistolary genre for the competition and not a letter to Raskolnikov's mother, but business correspondence.

We respect our time and the recipient's!

It makes sense to introduce yourself and remind the circumstances of acquaintance only in the first letter sent after a fleeting meeting at the exhibition. If this is a continuation of cooperation or current correspondence, in the first letter of the day we write: "Hello, Ivan", in the second and subsequent ones: "Ivan, …".

Appeal … I was always worried about who to contact in a letter if there are several recipients. I recently wrote a letter to three girls named Anna. Without any hesitation, I wrote "Hello, Anna" and did not bathe. But this is not always the case.

What if there are three or even seven recipients and they don't share the same name? You can list them by name: "Good afternoon, Rodion, Pulcheria, Avdotya and Pyotr Petrovich." But it is long and takes time. You can write: "Hello, colleagues!"

For myself, I use the rule to refer by name to the one who is in the "To" field. And to those who are in the copy, do not apply at all. This rule at the same time allows you to more accurately determine (one!) The addressee of the letter and the purpose of this letter.

Citation … Often, correspondence is a chain of letters with questions and answers - in a word, a dialogue. It is considered good form not to delete the history of the correspondence and write your answer at the top of the quoted text, so that, returning to this correspondence a week later, you can easily read the dialogue from top to bottom in descending dates.

For some reason, the default setting in Mozilla is "Place cursor after quoted text". I recommend changing it in the menu "Tools" → "Account settings" → "Composing and addressing". It should be like this.

Purpose of the letter … Business letters are of two types:

• when we simply inform the interlocutor (for example, a report on the work done for a month);
• and when we want something from the interlocutor. For example, so that he approves the attached invoice for payment.

As a rule, there are many more encouraging letters than reporting ones. If we want to achieve something from the interlocutor, it is very important to say this in a letter in plain text. The call to action should be accompanied by an address by name and followed by the last sentence in the letter.

Not right: "Porfiry Petrovich, I know who killed the old woman."

Right: "Porfiry Petrovich, I hacked to death the old woman, please, take measures for my arrest, I'm tired of suffering!"

Why should the correspondent think for you what to do with this letter? After all, he can make the wrong decision.

Signature in the text … She must be. Moreover, all e-mail clients allow you to set up auto-substitution of a signature, for example, the classic "Sincerely, …". In Mozilla, this is done under Tools → Account Options.

To write or not to write contacts in the signature is everyone's personal business. But if you are in any way connected with sales - be sure to write. Even if the transaction does not take place based on the results of communication, in the future you will be easily found by the contacts from the signature.

Finally, one more feature of the body of the letter for those interlocutors who do not like (cannot, does not want, does not have time) to answer your letters. Specify the default in the text of the letter. For example, "Porfiry Petrovich, if you don't come to arrest me before 12:00 on Friday, then I consider myself amnestied." Of course, the deadline must be real (you shouldn't send the text from the example on Friday at 11:50). The recipient must be physically able to read and decide on your letter. This "silence" relieves you of responsibility for the non-response of the interlocutor. As always, the use of this feature must be approached wisely. If a person responds to your letters on time and regularly, such an ultimatum can, if not offend him, then strain him a little or lead to a decision not to reply to the letter right now, but make you wait for Friday.

Attachments

Letters often come with attachments: resumes, commercial offers, estimates, schedules, scans of documents - a very convenient tool and at the same time a source of popular errors.

Error: huge attachment size. Emails with attachments up to 20 MB are often received. As a rule, these are scans of some documents in TIFF format, with a resolution of 600dpi. The correspondent's mail program will almost certainly hang for a few minutes in vain attempts to download a preview of this attachment. And God forbid the recipient to try to read this letter on a smartphone …

Personally, I delete such letters right away. Don't want your letter to end up in the trash before being read? Check the size of the attachment. It is recommended that it be no more than 3 MB.

What if it exceeds?

• Try reconfiguring your scanner to a different format and resolution. For example, in PDF and 300dpi, quite readable scans are obtained.
• Think of programs like WinRar or 7zip. Some files are perfectly compressed.
• What if the attachment is huge and you can't compress it? For example, an almost empty accounting database weighs 900 MB. Cloud storage of information will come to the rescue: Dropbox, Google Drive and the like. Some services, such as Mail.ru, automatically convert huge attachments into links to cloud storage. But I prefer to manage my information stored in the cloud myself, so I don't welcome automation from Mail.ru.

And one more not quite obvious recommendation about investments - their name … It must be understandable and acceptable to the recipient. Once we in the company were preparing a commercial offer addressed to … let it be Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. I received a letter from the manager with a project proposal for approval, and the attachment included a file named "DlyaFedi.docx". With the manager who sent me this, a dialogue took place something like this:

- Dear manager, are you personally ready to approach this respected person and name him in the face of Fedya?

- Somehow no, respected man, everyone calls him by his first name and patronymic.

- Why did you call the investment "Dlya Fedy"? If I send him right now, do you think he will buy axes from us for this CP?

- I was going to rename later …

Why prepare a time bomb - a prospect's rejection - or do yourself the extra work of renaming a file? Why not immediately name the attachment correctly: "For Fedor Mikhailovich.docx" or even better - "KP_Nebo_Topory.docx".

So, we have more or less sorted out with email as a "face". Let's move on to looking at email as a tool for effective work and talk about its distraction.

Working with letters

Email is a powerful distraction. As with any distraction, mail needs to be dealt with by tightening the rules and introducing a work schedule.

At a minimum, you need to turn off ALL notifications about the arrival of mail. If the mail client is configured by default, you will be notified with a sound signal, and the icon next to the clock will blink, and a preview of the letter will be shown. In a word, they will do everything to first tear you away from painstaking work, and then plunge you into the abyss of unread letters and unseen mailings - minus an hour or two from life.

Someone's powerful willpower allows them not to be distracted by notifications, and for ordinary people it is better not to tempt fate and turn them off. In Mozillla Thunderbird, this is done through the menu "Tools" → "Options" → "General" → "When new messages appear."

If there are no notifications, how to understand that a letter has arrived?

Very simple. You yourself, consciously, set aside time for parsing mail, open the mail client and see all unread messages. This can be done twice a day, for example, at lunchtime and in the evening, or during forced downtime, for example, in traffic jams.

Often asked, what about reaction times and urgent emails? The answer is: you have no urgent letters in the mail. Unless you work in the customer support department (such a department has its own rules for working with mail).

If there are urgent letters, the sender will notify you about this via other channels - phone, SMS, Skype. Then you will deliberately go into the mail client and process urgent mail. All time management gurus (for example, Gleb Arkhangelsky with his "Time Drive") declare the standard for responding to email up to 24 hours. This is a normal rule of good form - do not expect instant replies from the interlocutor by email. If there is an urgent letter, notify about it via faster communication channels.

So, we turned off notifications and now we turn on the mail client according to our schedule.

What should we do when we went into the mail and started doing activities called "parse email"? Where is the beginning and end of this work?

I've heard a lot about the zero inbox system, but unfortunately I haven't met a single person using it. I had to reinvent my wheel. There are articles on this topic on Lifehacker. For example, "". Below I will talk about the zero inbox system in my interpretation. I would be grateful if GTD gurus would check in the comments, add or improve the described system.

It is important to understand and accept that email is not a task scheduler or archive for your activities. Therefore, the "Inbox" folder should always be empty. If you have taken up the parsing of your inbox, do not stop and do not be distracted by anything until you empty this folder.

What to do with emails in your inbox? You need to go through each letter sequentially and delete it. Yes, just select and press Delete on your keyboard. If you can't bring yourself to delete the letter, you will have to decide what to do with it.

1. Can you answer it in three minutes? Do I need to answer it? Yes, it is necessary, and the answer will take no more than three minutes, then answer immediately.
2. You need to answer, but preparing the answer will take more than three minutes. If you use a task planner that allows you to turn an email into a task, turn your email into a task and forget about it for a while. For example, I use the absolutely wonderful Doit.im service. It allows you to generate a personal email address: you forward a letter to it, and it turns into a task. But if you do not have a task scheduler, move the letter to the "0_Run" subfolder.
3. After a quick response to a letter, turning it into a task or a simple familiarization, you need to decide what to do with this message next: delete it or send it to one of the folders for long-term storage.

Here are my long-term storage folders.

• 0_Run. I don't have such a folder, but if you don't have a planner, I repeat, you can put letters that require detailed study here. This folder also needs to be cleaned regularly, but with a thoughtful approach at a specially allotted time.
• 1_Ref. This is where I put letters with background information: welcome letters with logins from various web services, tickets for upcoming flights, and so on.
• 2_Projects. The archive of correspondence on partners and projects with which there is a current relationship is stored here. Naturally, a separate folder is created for each project or partner. In the folder of a partner, I put letters not only from his employees, but also letters from employees of "Heaven" related to this partner. Very convenient: if necessary, all correspondence on the project is at hand in a couple of clicks.
• 3_Museum. Here I am throwing those letters that are a pity to delete, and the benefits of them are not obvious. Also, folders with closed projects from "2_Projects" migrate here. In a word, the first candidates for deletion are kept in the "Museum".
• 4_Documents. Here are letters with electronic samples of documents that may be useful in the future for accounting, for example, statements of reconciliation from clients, tickets for trips that have taken place. The folder has much in common with the folders "2_Projects" and "1_Sprav", only accounting information is stored in it, and management information is stored in the folder "2_Projects". In "4_Documents" - dead information, and in "2_Projects" - live information.
• 5_Knowledge. This is where I only add really useful newsletters that I want to come back to after a while for inspiration or finding solutions.

There are other settings of the mail client that are important for the operation of this system. First, by default, Thunderbird has the Mark messages as read checkbox selected. I prefer to do it deliberately, so the checkbox is gone! To do this, go to the menu "Tools" → "Options" → "Advanced" → "Read and display".

Second, we use filters … Previously, I actively applied filters that automatically forwarded letters to the appropriate folders based on the sender's address. For example, letters from a lawyer were moved to the “Lawyer” folder. I refused this approach for several reasons. First: letters from a lawyer in 99% of cases relate to some project or partner, which means that they must be moved to the folder of this partner or project. Second, I decided to add awareness. You yourself must decide where a specific letter should be stored, and it is more convenient to search for unprocessed messages in only one place - in the inbox. Now I use filters only for categorizing automatic regular letters from various systems into folders, that is, letters that do not require me to make decisions. Filters in Mozilla Thunderbird are configured in the Tools → Message Filters menu.

So, with the right approach, e-mail should take from 10 to 60 minutes a day, depending on the volume of correspondence.

Yes, and one more thing. You've already turned off notifications about new emails, haven't you?;)