Whether you are a new graduate or someone with a lot of experience in your respective field, the art of writing a professional email is essential to guarantee growth in your career. As the widespread medium of communication in today’s world is through emails, you would have to write a professional email early on in your practical life. It is widely believed that the first impression is the last. Someone who reads a professional email written by you already makes up at least half of their mind whether to further collaborate with you or not. Hence, you must know exactly what you are doing while drafting your emails.
Many people would tell you how to write a professional email, but just some pointers are not enough. For something as important as this, it is necessary to master some basic tips for writing a professional email that you can have in mind all the time.
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10 Tips for Writing Professional Emails
Here are 10 excellent tips to help you improve your skills of writing a professional email.
1. Make the Subject to the Point and Purposeful
There are high chances that the person to whom you are sending this professional email is already flooded with too many emails. In that case, he would have to pick and choose which ones to read and which ones to directly send to the trash folder. Making your subject meaningful and apparently important would make the recipient read your professional email.
The key to writing a catchy email subject line is to make it precise but in a way that generates a little bit of curiosity in the reader's mind. Many marketing emails use quotations in the subject lines, such as ‘Would you like a discount coupon for your next visit?’ Stating a question and teasing the answer like this helps entice the recipient to open the email.
2. State Your Purpose at the Beginning
If the reader does not find the primary purpose of your email in the very beginning, he might start skimming instead and miss some of the important points that you would have wanted him to pay attention to. Hence, it is crucial to state and summarize the reason for writing at the start. This way, the reader would be able to gauge the urgency of the email and respond accordingly.
No matter how long your email body is, if the reader knows from the start what it’s about, they are more interested in reading it until the end. The attention span of us human beings in this digital age is surprisingly very low. At times, we have to use tips and tricks to even read our own pieces of content until the end.
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3. Make the Email Concise
Your professional email must be concise. If you start writing long paragraphs with little real content in each one of them, your email will lose its due importance in the eyes of the reader. Just like we like to manage our own time efficiently, we should try to value the reader's time as well. The attention span of an average individual does not allow them to read such long emails.
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Similarly, using a lot of jargon does not help either. A professional email should have clear and decent language, which is neither complicated nor lame. If you receive an email from a brand or colleague that you feel is quite professional, read it a couple of times to grasp the writing tone. Try to immerse yourself in that style so that the next time you are writing a professional email, you can automatically adopt that kind of flow in your email body.
4. Sound Professional
While writing a professional email, it is required that you sound professional and formal. This means that slang language is a big no. It does not give the right impression to read slang when you know it is intended to be a professional email.
This does not mean you cannot be friendly, though. Use a warm tone but be careful about the words that you use. If you work at a multinational company or run an international business, you must be extra cautious about this. If a certain kind of slang is considered alright in your country, it might be viewed as polite in another country’s culture.
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5. Remind Them of Yourself
If you have been collaborating with them earlier or met them in person, you could remind them of yourself by mentioning something that happened when you met or some commitment they made with you in your past conversations. This would help them identify who you are and speed up their response.
This technique is often used in marketing emails, which are also a kind of professional email. If you visit a website and sign up for their newsletter, for instance, you will probably be reminded about the products you viewed on the website on your last visit in the newsletter you’ll receive from them.
6. Reinforce Your Purpose
While ending the email, before moving to the closing remarks, make sure that you summarize in just one line or a maximum of two lines your intent of writing the email to them again. This would not unnecessarily elongate your email but make it clear to the reader what you want from them by giving them a summary of the email.
Professional emails are always sent with a purpose. Make sure you clearly convey to the recipient what that purpose is. Sending extravagant emails when they are not really needed can drop their value in the eyes of your colleagues or clients.
7. Be Kind in Your Closing Remarks
In a world where everyone is busy, it is good to sound kind. Not everyone has the time to sound thankful and kind all the time. But we cannot ignore the impact that it has on the reader. When the reader feels appreciated, he is more eager to fulfill the purpose, due to which this professional email was written in the first place. So properly thank the recipient for taking the time to read your email and add a line that gives the impression that you are keenly waiting for their response.
8. Make a Standard Signature
Make a standard signature that you can use to sign off every professional email you send. This way, you would not have to rethink how to write your name and designation or position, for example, while ending your email. It saves time and makes the recipient remember you if you are frequently in touch with them and write a professional email to them often.
Do not underestimate the importance of stating that the recipient should not hesitate to get back to you. It is worth noting that in the first email you send, rather than having to send a couple of emails just to remind the corresponding person that you’ve been waiting for their reply.
9. Proofread the Email Before Sending
Regardless of your level of expertise in writing a professional email, you may have made some grammatical or spelling mistakes while typing. It is also possible that you forgot to write something you wanted to address. Therefore, make it a habit to always reread your professional email before sending it to the recipient.
While proofreading, ensure that you have included all the necessary elements of a professional email. These elements include the following.
- A proper subject that is concise as well as comprehensive.
- A greeting or salutation that is respectful and appropriate indicates that you are, in fact, writing a professional email.
- The main body clearly states the purpose of your email.
- Closing remarks that sound respectful.
- Your signature.
10. Follow Up
You must strike a balance between flooding the other’s inbox with your emails and courteously following up to ensure that your professional email does not get ignored amidst so many other emails in the recipient’s inbox. You have to make sure that your work gets done, and hence you should stay in contact with the recipient and ask for updates politely.
The Takeaway
If you follow all of the instructions or tips mentioned above, there are high chances that you will receive the desired outcome of sending out your emails. Also, you must keep practicing your communication skills so that when you meet them in person, your persona reflects the impression you gave in your professional email.
If you are writing a professional email to a client, keep in mind that having your email address on your business domain creates a perfect impression. If you build your brand website on Strikingly, you can easily create custom email addresses to take your outreach efforts to a whole new level.
Besides this, Strikingly offers many other tools that help you provide a smooth website browsing experience to your visitors and customers. A website built on Strikingly is simple to make, convenient to edit or update, and user-friendly for various marketing strategies.
