What do I need to get some attention?
“The average American employee spends about a quarter of their working day (around one and three quarter hours) dealing with email” ManagementIssues.com
It’s hard to scan through and pick out the ‘important’ emails to respond to when one is faced with a deluge of email every single day. Here are some personal tips for email headers which I use to ensure the email gets read and replied to in the fastest possible manner.
1. Get Personal - Type in the person’s name into your subject heading. This is perhaps one of the lesser known and most underrated approaches to crafting email subject lines, but works incredibly well for me For example: Rather than an email title of ‘Need your report’, try ‘John: Need your report’. Get that person’s name in there and you instantly create a more personable experience, and a higher chance of your email getting read.
2. Tell them if the request is a quick one – If you require some really quick work done or input from the recipients, let them know it won’t occupy too much of their time. For example, if it takes 2 minutes to complete, tell them it will take 2 minutes, or mark down ‘Quick request’ in the subject header. That way your email comes through as a task that can be quickly dealt with, and will have a higher chance of being read with something done about it.
3. Don’t overuse the word ‘Urgent’ - Make this mistake and you’ll start to sound like the ‘boy who cried wolf’. When a truly urgent email goes out with a subject heading starting with the word ‘URGENT’, you don’t want your recipients to glaze over it.
4. Be specific – Get right to the point with your subject headers. Also make use of acronyms like ’FYI’ and ‘FYA’ in the headers itself so the recipients know what they will need to do after reading your email.
5. Be concise – If your title has less words, it’s easier to scan, you’ll increase your chance of it getting read.
What email productivity tips do you use? Tell us in the comments!
[tags] email[/tags]
October 19th, 2007 at 8:19 am
Nice post here. Good reminders. I get emails from my boss with the subject line: “???” when he has a question. I refer to these as the “Swoop and Poop” method. Quick entry, drop the crap and fly away. And the email with a blank subject line always make my teeth itch. You just never know what’s coming. Ugh.
When I send email outside of our company, I have to remind myself to flag my subject line as such:
“My Company Name: Insert short subject title here.”
With inter company email, I try to stay consistent with a one word format followed by a concise subject, e.g., “Request for info: Please submit …..” or
“Follow Up: Per your phone request on….” or
“Completed: Spreadsheet matrix for….” etc.
The key is thinking of ‘tags’ as subject line introductions. Not too many though. Keep it basic.
Now, if only others did this for me!
October 19th, 2007 at 10:33 am
Hmmmm… I’ve noticed that a lot of spammers have been putting the recipient’s name in the subject line. Obviously, they do it because they think it works, too — but could that make it less useful for us non-spammers over time?
I definitely agree with you on making headers specific. I hate subject lines that say “Hi” or “What’s up” (though, I admit that I sometimes use it when I can’t think of anything better). Not only does it make it less likely that I’ll view the email right away, it makes it harder to find in my inbox later.
October 21st, 2007 at 1:08 pm
I like specific subjects because I can tell them apart from spam easier.
October 22nd, 2007 at 12:21 am
BigNerd: That is an excellent tip indeed – thanks for sharing!
Meg & Yasser: Good point :)
October 23rd, 2007 at 11:36 am
My office is using outlook. So outlook can help to do everything for me..
October 27th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
return receipt works for me. but it does not involved headers and depends on the mail server that you use.
November 20th, 2007 at 9:27 am
Great tips & some comments too…i will apply them. Thks
September 24th, 2008 at 3:45 am
I’m big into changing your email headers to not look like spam. Put your company information and maybe your phone number. Also no “quick question” emails. If it is that quick… put it in the subject! (but also repeat it in the body, as it is easy to miss)
Just linked to you, I did a story over at varbuzz.com