Summary
This page has been created to help craft emails that are effective at delivering the intended message and to help provide a level of trust to the recipient. By following these tips, the recipients of the email will be less apt to think that the email is a Phishing scam or is with malicious intent.
Steps
1. Use BCC: If the email is going to many people, using BCC or “Blind Carbon Copy" is essential. Using BCC will prevent the recipients from Replying to All and flooding everyone’s inbox.
2. Sender Account: The sender of the email should be a known and valid email. It should be an email account that is able to receive replies or the email should be configured to direct replies to someone who can review any replies.
3. Subject Line: The subject line could be the most important part of the email. If you're cold-emailing someone, or just establishing a professional relationship, your subject line can entice people to open the message as well as set expectations about what's enclosed. On the other hand, a poorly crafted or generic subject line (like “Hi" or “You don't wAnt to miss thos") can deter the reader and result in your email being ignored or landing in the spam folder.
4. Opening Greeting: In most emails, you'll want to include a quick greeting to acknowledge the reader before diving into your main message or request. Some common greetings include: Greetings, Hello, Good Afternoon and Good Morning.
5. Establish Purpose: Create a short opening sentence that establishes “why" you are sending this message.
6. Email Body: The body of an email is the meat of your message. It must have a clear and specific purpose, such as getting feedback on a presentation or arranging a meeting with a new client. It should also be concise. People will be more inclined to read it, rather than skimming it and risking missing critical information. If you can, boil it down to a few choice sentences. And for emails that require more length and detail, keep it as focused as you can. Nobody wants to receive a novel.
7. Use Standard Fonts: Times New Roman and Calibri and the most used fonts and are often default. Using fonts other than these may cause the email to look odd or out of the norm.
8. Use Standard Font Sizes: Avoid using large or small font sizes. Small font sizes may be hard to read and large font may cause the email to look odd.
9. Avoid Unnecessary Formatting:
- ALL CAPS: Occasionally, caps work to put emphasis on a word or phrase. But more often than not, your audience feels like you're YELLING AT THEM! Err on the side of good email etiquette and avoid the caps lock.
- Bold, italics and underline: While these features can be used to emphasize a point, too much of a good thing goes bad quickly. An email full of bold, italicized and underlined text could come across as aggressive, or even rude.
- Exclamation points!!!: When used sparingly, the exclamation point can effectively communicate excitement. But go too far and you not only lessen the impact of the exclamation point, but you also risk coming across as childish or insincere. If you must use them, try to limit yourself to one exclamation point per business email.
- Highlighting: The use of highlighting is acceptable if used sparingly, but excessive highlighting can be distracting.
10. Avoid Attachments (when possible): Phishing emails often contain attachments with malicious code or links. If possible, it is always best to not include attachments to emails. Attachments also consume storage space and can clog up the recipient’s email account preventing them from sending/receiving future emails. Rather than forcing the reader to download an attachment and open it in a separate program, you will probably get faster results if you just copy-paste the most important part of the document into the body of your message. Referencing a location where the recipient can get the attachments or providing a link to a County website would also be acceptable.
11. Use Links to Internal Resources Only (when possible): It is always best to link to internal resources. This would be resources that are on a County hosted web service such as the County's website, ThePoint, or a department web server. Linking to resources that are hosted externally (other than County) may cause the user to question the legitimacy of the link and the email. Of course, this cannot be avoided in every situation, following the other steps in this document should help to alleviate the readers concern.
12. Use Honest Links: A common method that recipients use to check the validity of a link is to hover the mouse curser over the link without clicking on the link. Doing this will pop-up the URL that the link will actually take the recipient to. It is best to provide the full URL in the body of the email so that when “hovered over" the exact same link is shown. Avoid using link wording like “Click Here".
13. Avoid Spelling and Grammar Errors: A sloppy, error-ridden email does nothing for your email etiquette reputation. These types of errors raise the red flags of a Phishing scam above anything else. Your readers shouldn't have to mentally edit your work to understand your message. Check and double-check everything from the subject line to the email signature, including grammar, capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. Pro tip: Also remember to check all links! Recipients who click a link that takes them nowhere will likely abandon your email altogether.
14. Close in a respectful manner: Just as you want to start things off on the right foot with your greeting, you also want to part well. That means writing a friendly sign-off. Your sign-off can be as simple as Thanks, Thank you, Regards, Best or Sincerely. You'll want to choose a closing that feels genuine to your personality and tailor it to the relationship to ensure an appropriate level of professionalism.
15. Provide Contact Information: Always include your relevant contact information, so the recipient knows how to reach you. To make things easy, create a professional email signature that includes your name, job title, company, business address and phone number.
16. Ask Others to Review Your Email: Before sending the email, be sure to double and triple check it for all of the above. Asking someone else to review the email before it is sent is also a great idea.
Example
The below email is an example of an email that contains many of the elements listed above. Some of them have been highlighted as an example.