How to improve your business email writing skills?

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Information Oct 25, 2021 0

How to improve your business email writing skills?

The essential set of basics you will require to step up with your business email skill.

When it comes to your professional life, email writing skill is one of the mandatory skills that you need to master. Let’s read the below tips on how to improve email writing to write better work emails.




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Keeping things shorter

It is an understandable fact that sometimes we need to cover a lot of details in one email, but the first and the most important point that you must consider in email writing is to keep things short. Focus on the significant points that need to be mentioned in the email and try to avoid making the email wordy by using unnecessary redundant phrases. The ideal length of an email should be 50 to 125 words. Therefore, always keep this word limit in your mind when you write your work emails.

Making things easy to read

An average workday will have an abundance of back and forth emails. As a result, we can not expect a lot of time from the readers of our emails. The average attention span of your reader lies around 10-15 seconds. This is one of the valid points why we must consider keeping our emails easily readable. Draft out short and direct sentences. Have line breaks wherever required. Likewise, having lists with bullet points will make your email easy for the reader to read.

Familiarize with proper etiquette

The next step would be to polish your email writing with proper etiquette. Always be mindful of the tone of your writing. The attitude you put into your writing has a direct impact on creating an impression about you to the reader; this can go both ways, either make the reader have a pleasant thought about your email or start an email war. Therefore, make sure to read your writing a couple of times to see how you sound and catch spelling and grammatical mistakes.

The subject line

The subject line is the very first impression you give in your email to the reader, so it is important to be precise here, making sure that your email is not going to end up in the trash. The email subject is the strongest way to grab and hold your reader’s attention to read your email and maybe to respond to you back with a reply. Avoid the use of common phrases like ‘Following up’ and ‘Kind reminder’ or ‘Checking in’ when writing your subject line. Ideally, your subject line should be a 50-70 character summary of the detailed email you are going to write. Moreover, the reader should get a clear idea of what the email consists of from the subject itself; likewise, the subject line should help the reader to find the email by searching later on.

The greeting and introduction

Right after you have managed to make the reader open your email with your catchy subject line, the greeting and introduction would be the next step to turn the reader’s attention to start reading your email. Greetings can be varied from formal settings to casual settings; if you are addressing an official who is related to your work, the ideal way to greet would be to start with ‘Dear Sir/ Madam’ or the particular person’s name. Whereas, in casual settings, you will be free to greet with the usual ‘Hey’ or ‘Hi’ with the reader’s name. Next would be your introduction. The general courtesy emphasizes that the writer should begin with a friendly introduction similar to “I hope this email finds you well”. Make sure to be friendly as this will be the start of your note but do not forget about the limited attention span of the reader.

The body

This is the real deal where the full detail of your note would be included. The first important point you should consider here is to avoid including multiple discussions in one email. Always look forward to having one main discussion per message. If you have another discussion to follow up that is unrelated to the current discussion, make the habit of writing a separate email to follow up on it. Segregation of discussions like this will eventually help you when attending to things later on. Furthermore, just as we discussed earlier, be mindful to have short paragraphs and improve clarity with bullet-point lists. Always remember, clarity is the key.

The call to action

This section emphasizes the purpose of the email; in other words, your expectation from the recipient after they finish reading your email. Therefore, it is important to end your work emails with a clear call to action stating what is expected from the recipient. A couple of most used direct and clear call to action phrases would be “Let me know what you think” or “Could you please get back with the details?”. Avoid sounding vague and phrase out direct and clear sentences to the point. Similarly, this is the section where you should highlight deadlines if it is a discussion about deadline-oriented tasks.

The signature

The final step of the email would be the signature section. There are a few mandatory components that should be included in your signature. A work email signature should start with your first and last names followed by the name of the company you work for, with your job title. The third line should include your contact details. The last or the final line should end up with a link to your company website.

A few more final steps

Just before you press SEND after finalizing everything, make it a habit to proofread a couple of times until you find out that your writing is to the point and clear without any spelling or grammatical mistakes. An ideal way to improve your email writing skill is to refer to samples that are published online. Do a small google-search on email drafts whenever you need to put more professionalism into your work email.

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