Anyone that sends emails to friends, relatives or potential patrons business should know that not all emails are read. This is especially unfortunate for those that spend a lot of time working on the content of their emails. If you want to ensure that your emails are read each time you send them out, read on for some tips.
1. Concise, but not robotic
Let’s face it: a lot of us hate reading a lot of text, and so we won’t really need every bit of detail, unless we are reading the fine print of a document.
Think about people that talk a lot all the time. We often just tune them out to the point that we hardly hear what they are saying.
This is just a natural response to the ‘noise’, and emails that are lengthy have the same effect on us, because they are tedious and boring to read. This is why writing more concise emails is one way of getting others to read your email, no matter the topic. If you yourself are sick of reading long emails, then chances are that your friends, relatives or potential customers are, too.
However, bear in mind that this does not mean that your emails should look like telegrams. They can still be warm and informative, but you do not need to include each and every detail if these additional details are unnecessary.
2. Rethink or rewrite your email subject
A lot of email subjects are not catchy enough, and simply fail to catch attention. This is one of the biggest errors of individuals that send out emails.
The subject of your email should summarize its content, and work just like headlines for news articles. For this reason, they should be short, to the point and catchy.
3. Place Yourself in The Receiver’s Shoes
In placing yourself in the shoes of the person or persons you are sending the email to, what to put in your email (so that it is read) will be clearer to you.
It helps to use your imagination and creativity in writing emails, especially as a lot of people are tired of reading emails that are mundane and contain no important information, including spam emails.
4. Make it specific
Do you know the person or personality of the person you are sending the email to? Sending a more specific and personal email helps in getting an email read.
Personalization is usually what separates real emails from spam. Likewise, a lot of businesses simply do not comprehend that the emails they send out tend to be very impersonal.
5. Double Check
A lot of us have a habit of immediately hitting “send”, the moment we are done typing our email. Every now and then, we realize that there is a mistake in our email, and that we should not have hit send yet.
This problem can be eliminated by double-checking for errors before sending an email, or installing Gmail’s Undo Send add-on feature, which allows a user to retrieve the email he/she had just sent, so it can be edited for errors before sending the email again.
Knowing how to write emails properly greatly increases the chance of getting them read, and for individuals marketing products or services via email, this knowledge can be very powerful.
Likewise, if you have the habit of sending or forwarding some emails to your family or friends, it helps to note the points mentioned in the above guide, to ensure that your emails will be read, as it is a waste of time to compose an email if the receiver/s will just delete or never read it.
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