E-mail Tips
Email... Here at Promote Button HQ we have been asking
our clients, colleagues and friends about e-mail and some of their pet hates.
What we did not expect was the number of similar complaints. We had complaints
about senders in the USA not understanding the UK is a separate country and that
e-mail content like American comedy does not always travel well. We had similar
responses from France, Germany and other European states.
Then we had many requests on how do I start
an e-mail, what are signature files, what is CC and BCC how do I use these
facilities. We had e-mails send to 100's because the user did not understand CC,
we were astounded at the number of business's who showed a complete ignorance of
peoples privacy and sent clients names and address's in the CC field.
Many found starting an e-mail with Hi,
offensive as was Hello [first name] which is sent on a daily basis to a
colleague. His name is Martin and his name is important to him but sending to
[first name] shows ignorance of technology and is highly unlikely to motivate
Martin to do business with the offending company...
So with professional trainers at
AQT we have put together a
brief summary on e-mail use covering the
basics like CC - Carbon Copy and BCC - Blind Carbon Copy and how to use. Also
signature files and how you can use them to promote the sender or his business,
without over doing it.
So briefly
remember e-mails are often written in an informal style, and are generally brief.
You enter the text of your email in the body of the message. The most
important tip for writing an email message is brevity. People typically get so many emails in a day that a long email
often doesn't get read until later -- sometimes much, much later.
Remember that you can copy text from another document or email and paste it
into a new email, so you don't have to retype text. Many email programs will
also let you paste pictures and documents into your message.
Email is more informal than paper mail because it is used with more frequency
and immediacy. Unless it is a personal letter, email usually gets right to the
point without a lengthy introduction. Many people don't include a "Dear Sir"
clause, and often do not include a signoff, letting the "To:" and "From:" fields
speak for themselves. Signatures can also include a standard signoff.
You can avoid having the formatting of your email getting messed up
by putting your email in text standard format. Make sure that you have turned off any
word wrap
options that cut lines into standard lengths by inserting carriage returns,
since these are unnecessary and cause formatting problems with most modern email
programs.
Carbon Copying or CC
Put any other address you want to receive your e-mail in the CC
field and they will receive it, but all addressees sent to will be visible in
your e-mail...
Blind Carbon Copying or BCC
Summary: You can "blind carbon" copy people on an email without
the other addressees knowing about it.
The term "carbon copy" comes from the days of typewriters, when copies were made by typing on paper with several layers.
Between each layer of paper was a thin sheet with carbon on the bottom side, so
that when the typewriter keys hit the paper, the impact made a "carbon copy" of
the letter on the paper sheet underneath. When you were finished typing a page,
you would separate out the paper and throw away the carbon sheets.
Normally you could get two, three, and four layer carbon copy paper. The top paper always got the typewriter ink and
looked the best, and the top carbon copies always looked much crisper than the
lower copies, as the force of the typewriter key dissipated through the layers.
Occasionally, by accident or design, an extra carbon copy would be given to
someone not on the official CC carbon copy address list. Because there was no
way the official addressees could know about these extra copies, they were
called "blind carbon-copies" (BCC).
It turned out that people liked this feature so much they built it into
email. If you put an address in the BCC field of an email, it will be copied to
that address, but the addresses in the To and CC fields won't know about it,
because the BCC field is not displayed on incoming messages.
Some of the ways that the BCC field can be used are listed below:
-
Plain old secrecy. You can blind copy an email to someone without
the other addresses knowing that you did so to make a third party aware of an
important issue, or to establish an independent confidential record of your
email. Remember that your actions may cause you problems or even get you
accused of deception.
-
Network diagnostics. You can double-check that an important email
makes it out onto the Internet backbone by blind copying yourself on the email
at another address, preferably at a different domain name. If the email copied
to yourself arrives at your other address, then you can be reasonably sure
that the other copy of the email to the main addressee was sent and made it as
far as the Internet backbone, and assures you that your local system, email
server, and network connection is functioning well. If the intended email
still doesn't arrive at its main destination, then the problem is likely with
the addressee's ISP network or email server.
Remember that the SMTP protocol which governs e-mail transfer, are
only stripped off the email at the destination email server. Therefore, if
the addressee controls their email server or can get access to it, they could
examine the BCC addresses on every email they receive. SMTP is designed this way
for a couple of reasons:
The Subject line
Should be suggestive enough of the
contents of the e-mail to enable a reader to make a decision whether to open the
e-mail based on the subject alone.
One of the most important rules of a good e-mail is to enter a
meaningful subject. In a typical long list of e-mails in an inbox, the subject
line is the most prominent field, and a meaningful subject is the most useful
piece of information you can include. If you want your e-mail read, write a good
subject line!
Some examples of bad and good subjects are shown below:
| BAD |
GOOD |
| Misc |
Free Tickets to tonight's game |
| Request |
Request: Widget part number |
| Meeting |
Team Building Session - All Hands |
Summary: Always choose a meaningful subject.
