Writing e-mail etiquette, Part 1

Writing e-mail etiquette
In 21st century it is almost a “must” to have an e-mail account. Creating an e-mail account is similar to setting up a tool for communication; however, using the tool in a most efficient way possible will increase your productivity and professionalism. Below find some tips that you might find useful:

• Do NOT use slang even if you write/reply to your best friend or boss.
• To start writing professionally, start with simple template.
• i.e. Greeting phrase/statement → One lane space → Message body → Closing phrase/statement.
• To distinct your e-mail content, try to use unconventional greeting and ending salutations.
• i.e. Greetings, Dear, Good day, and ending phrases: Farewell instead of Take care, Sincerely yours, Respectfully, Greatly appreciated.
• Always express appreciation, respect and include thanks before or as closing statement. Samples:
• I would sincerely appreciate if you could...
• I understand your … and would appreciate if you...
• Thank you for your time and consideration.
• Try to sounds as positive as possible.
• Save e-mail templates on draft, if you know you will reply to similar e-mails in the future.
• i.e. If you are applying for a job and have couple of contacts in mind that you want to e-mail, write one e-mail and save it for the future in case you want to contact more people. Yes, you can always retrieve it from “Sent box,” but you would have to do this every time you want to e-mail someone.
• The benefit of this is you will improve your template every time you e-mail and/or want to include a catchy phrase.
• i.e. You can also apply this in almost any industry, IT (technical procedures that users can follow on their own), Linkedin adding a contact custom message rather than default provided by Linkedin.com, and etc.
• For productivity, use filters to organize your incoming e-mails. For those who are not familiar how filters work, filters are simply as it sounds it “filters” incoming e-mails by domain name and allocate it to an assigned folder.
• i.e. If you would like all your bank messages/alerts to be in one folder, copy the domain (i.e. chase.com, bankofamerica.com, etc.) and paste to: sent from box and save the filter.
• Yahoo Mail filter setup: http://www.ehow.com/how_5578374_set-email-filters-yahoo-mail.html
• Gmail filter setup: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6579
• Other useful resources:
• 101 Email Etiquette: http://101emailetiquettetips.com/
• Email Etiquette: http://emailreplies.com/