It is a new year and a great time to begin new, healthy habits and unload old, harmful tendencies. Most people plan or list resolutions for the year. Some of those goals are giant-sized and others regarding their impact. Others are strenuous and require great commitment as compared to some rather easily attained changes that are quite impactful. In this and a subsequent blog I will address email and try to provide some useful tools to help you improve your email communications.
Undoubtedly, you have read multiple articles and documents on how to more effectively communicate via email. Some have acronyms attached for more handy recollection. Others are a list of tips – 10 or 15. I can never remember those, though all informative and beneficial.
So, I have chosen a word that will hopefully help you write more careful, thoughtful and meaningful emails, tweets and texts. That word is EASY. It’s easy for me to remember and it is a short and descriptive word that whether used or not by you will not be “easily” forgotten – and that is the point.
Edifying: providing informative and supported information in an email is critical. Begin with the Subject Line and continue throughout the document. My subject line today – “Email should be EASY” hopefully grabbed your attention and compelled you to read it. My intent is to make it helpful and informative for you and to back my claim of the goodness of EASY. By using this acronym, I am attempting to support the claims and information provided.
Accurate: since I made this Cornerstone Moment up, I had to carefully consider content accuracy. The letter that I thought the most about was Y and you will see in a moment that I have more to write about Y than any other. I do believe that this information is accurate, though many other words or acronyms could be used, it was the first to come to my mind when thinking of discussing effective email communication.
Succinct: email is a topic that is written about a great deal and though this write up is not as succinct as it could be, it is also not nearly as long as the topic begs it to be. So, let’s always consider that you must resist the temptation of providing all that you may want to share in a single email. You must make your point, but as we say in sales “Don’t sell past the close”.
You: your email should be “you” through and through. People who read it and know you should be able to hear you speaking the words and visualizing your facial expressions and body language. When communicating with someone who does not know you, and if not being “you”, how will you communicate consistently through a series of emails, voice mail or face-to-face meetings? If writing as if someone else, you can bet your intentions will almost certainly be understood differently than intended. When you finally do meet that person or talk on the phone, the recipient will wonder whom that was communicating with them earlier, or perhaps if that person was genuine. It is highly likely that each of us is guilty of this camouflage at some point in our lives. I know that I have attempted “cleverism” (not a real word) in email before and then later read my message with both wonderment and embarrassment. Anyone else ever been there?
Be “you” and let them know that you are sincere, concerned, excited or whatever “succinct” message you want to send. Edifying, Accurate, Succinct and You: EASY. That’s it! Be informative and accurate and it will be “easy” to understand your email communication.