A Company Needs to Implement Etiquette Rules for the Following Three Reasons

EFFECTIVE EMAILING—RULES OF PRACTICE

In sending email messages, there are certain rules of practice that ought to be followed. If followed, these rules help to ensure that you maintain a professional and effective email profile. Generally speaking, these rules fall into three categories:

A. Rules pertaining to language usage (i.e. the actual text that you send in the body of an email)

B. Rules pertaining to email content (i.e. what should/should not appear in the body of your email)

C. Rules pertaining to email structure and delivery (i.e. how emails should be sent and what should/should not be sent with them).

A. RULES PERTAINING TO LANGUAGE USAGE

Write concisely and be direct: It is easy for the reader of an email to become distracted. An unduly long email may not be read in its entirety. Key points and subtleties could be lost. Be direct and to the point in setting out for the reader the issues that you wish to address and have him/her address.

Pay attention to spelling, grammar & punctuation: Poor spelling and grammar and improper use of punctuation convey a bad impression of the writer and can distort the meaning of your message. Emails with no or incorrect punctuation are often difficult to read and confusing. If your word processing program has a spell- check/grammar-check program, use it. Don’t forget to proofread your emails before they are sent.

Use the active instead of passive voice: Prefer the active voice of a verb to the passive voice. “We will respond to your inquiry today”, reads better than “Your inquiry will be answered today”. The latter statement is more formal and somewhat stilted. The active voice helps to make a sentence direct and concise.

Avoid long, convoluted sentences: Email is meant to be a quick medium—easily composed, rapidly sent and efficiently processed. The specifics and subtleties of an email communication can be lost if your email is too long or convoluted.

If possible, avoid abbreviations and emoticons: In business emails, try not to use abbreviations such as BTW (by the way) and LOL (laugh out loud) or emoticons such as the smiley :-). Their use can reflect badly on your professional image in that they are inappropriately informal and familiar. Then too, the reader may not know what these abbreviations and emoticons mean. You want to ensure that your email messages are intelligible and understood.

Don't send or forward emails containing libelous, defamatory, racist, sexist, obscene or otherwise offensive remarks: By writing or even forwarding just one libelous or potentially offensive remark, you expose yourself to the potential for legal liability. You can be sued for defamatory comments embodied in an email message. It does not matter whether the comments were made by you or simply passed on by you. Then too, these kinds of comments reflect badly on the writer and can negatively impact relationships. Opt for the use of appropriate and politically correct language.

Keep your language gender neutral to the extent possible: Avoid assigning masculine gender to neutral terms. Apart from using he/she or s/he, you can avoid pronouns or recast material in the plural so that gender-specific terms need not be used.

B. RULES PERTAINING TO EMAIL CONTENT

Customize your emails: Not only should your emails be personally addressed, but they should also include personal, customized content. To this end, appropriately tailored templates can be used.

Answer all questions and anticipate further questions: An email reply should respond to all inquiries, and anticipate and pre-empt further questions. If you do not answer all questions posed in the original email, you likely will be sent follow-up questions. Unanswered questions suggest a lack of care and a lack of attention to detail. In a business context, when you anticipate and pre-empt further questions, you can enhance your professional profile. In anticipating and responding to potential concerns or information needs, you present a thorough and thoughtful image.

Be responsive and answer emails without undue delay: Emails allow for a quick exchange of information. If time were not of the essence, a letter or fax would be sent. It is good etiquette to respond to email within 24 hours after receipt, and preferably within the same working day. If the email received is complicated such that a delayed response is appropriate, you should at least acknowledge receipt of the email within a 24-hour period. In your acknowledgement of receipt, you should indicate that a more detailed response will be forthcoming. In this way, the person with whom you are communicating will have comfort that his/her email has been received and will be attended to in short order.

Do not type in UPPER CASE, unless a word is properly comprised of capital letters: TYPING IN UPPER CASE LETTERS IS SYNONOMOUS WITH SHOUTING. Receiving an email cast in capital letters can be annoying and can trigger delivery of a ‘flame mail’. Try to avoid typing with upper case letters unless you are typing a word properly comprised of upper case letters (by way of example: the abbreviation U.S.A.).

Add disclaimers to your emails: Adding disclaimers to your emails may help to shield you from legal liability. For instance, a disclaimer at the bottom of every email message sent by you that places the onus on the recipient to check for viruses may not be foolproof, but it will help in your defence if you are sued for having corrupted someone’s email because of a virus forwarded by you. Then too, if you add an email disclaimer to every message sent internally indicating that company employees are directed to refrain from making defamatory statements, you help to advance the defence, in the event of a lawsuit by a disgruntled employee, that your company did everything it could to prevent the delivery of offensive emails. Delete chain letters: Delete chain letters when you receive them. Your professionalism can be called into question if you forward chain letters in a business context. It is annoying and upsetting to receive a chain letter that foretells ill fortune if not forwarded.

Delete hoaxes: If you receive an email message warning you of a new virus that will immediately delete everything from your computer, you are likely reading a hoax. Be careful about opening any attachments to these kinds of messages, because often these attachments contain viruses. Then too, be wary of email messages that promise a financial windfall or ask for your help for a charitable cause. Even if the content seems to be credible, the senders often are not.

Do not copy a message or attachment without permission: Do not copy a message or attachment unless you have the originator’s permission to copy it and/or forward it to others. Without obtaining the necessary permission, you could be infringing on copyright laws and exposing yourself to legal liability.

Do not use email to discuss confidential information unless proper safeguards are in place and you have everyone’s consent to address confidential issues in this way: There is always a risk that what you type in an email can be viewed by others. Unless you and the person with whom you are communicating agree that confidential information can be exchanged via email, the risks notwithstanding, reserve discussion on confidential issues for telephone conferences or face-to-face meetings. Remember too, if you are ever to engage in litigation in respect of your business dealings, your computer hard-drive could be accessed and emails sent by you ordered produced.

C. RULES PERTAINING TO EMAIL STRUCTURE AND DELIVERY

Use proper structure and layout: Since reading from a screen puts greater strain on the eye than does reading from paper, attention should be given to message structure and layout. Use short paragraphs that are spaced in a way that enhances legibility. When making points, number them or mark each point as being separate (i.e. with bullets or headings). Your emails should be easy to read and should highlight key points for ease of reference.

Take care with your formatting: Remember that the recipient of your emails may not be able to view your formatting, or may see words printed with a font that is different than you had intended. When using colors in your emails, ensure that they allow for legible text against the computer screen backdrop.

Avoid using URGENT and IMPORTANT unless the email is indeed URGENT: Mean what you say and say what you mean. Do not identify an email as being urgent unless it truly is. Then too, if an email message is urgent, you might want to follow-up with a telephone call to ensure that the intended recipient knows that your email has been sent and needs to be read.

Use a meaningful subject line to properly identify the heart of the communication: Try to capture the heart of your message in a subject line that will have meaning both to you and to the recipient. Your subject should be identified with specificity. A request for information, by way of example, should set out the nature of the information being requested. That means, if you are seeking pricing information on a particular product, your subject line should not read: Request for Information but rather: Request for pricing information in respect of Product X.

Do not attach unnecessary files to your email: By sending large attachments, you can annoy the recipient and even cause his/her computer to crash. Wherever possible, try to compress attachments. Only send attachments when they are necessary and on point. Then too, take special care to scan all attachments for viruses before they are sent.

Do not request delivery and read receipts, except in cases where time is of the essence and follow-up by email or telephone is not appropriate: Some computers don’t sustain the ‘receipt’ function. Others block this function. You cannot be sure, in sending requests for delivery and read receipts, that you will be provided with reliable information. Then too, some people consider it to be an invasion of their privacy to know that their receipt of emails is being tracked. If you want to be sure that an email has been received, it is often better and safer to ask the recipient to notify you of its receipt.

Use templates for frequently used and/or boilerplate responses: In a business context, there is typically some information which you are routinely requested to provide. You might wish to create standard forms of reply that you save as response templates and paste into your email messages using a processing system such as AnswerEmail.

Mailings: When sending an email to multiple recipients, you want to think twice about listing all of the email addresses in the To field. If the To field is used, you are disclosing to all of the recipients of your email that the email has been sent to others. Then too, you are publishing the email addresses of those on your emailing list--without their permission. In these days of heightened privacy concerns and legislation, this ought not to be done. What you want to do, instead, is to include the mailing list email address in the To field or, alternatively, do a mail merge and create one message for each recipient. A mail merge also allows you to use fields in the message, so that you can address each recipient personally.

Use the Cc field sparingly: Try not to use the Cc field unless the person whom you are copying can easily determine why it is that he or she is being sent a copy of your message. Then too, Cc recipients might not know who among them is supposed to act on the message received. Be clear about what you expect and from whom.

Think twice about sending rich text and HTML messages: Know that when you send an email in rich text or HTML format, the recipient may receive your message as a .txt attachment. You want to take steps to maximize recipient ease in opening and reading your emails.

Don't reply to spam: By replying to spam or by ‘unsubscribing’, you are confirming that your email address is active. Unless you are unsubscribing from a mail list that you recognize and to which you may have had yourself added, it is best if you simply hit the delete button in respect of emails that you wish to discard. Then too, you might want to install email software that identifies spam as junk mail and removes it automatically. Do not ask to recall a message unless you can be sure that the message will indeed be recalled if it has not been read: The recall feature does not always work. Too often, the message recalled has already been read by the time that the recall request is received. A more professional and effective way to deal with an email sent in error, even one sent internally, is to admit the error by follow-up email. You can then request, specifically, that your earlier email message be discarded and its contents ignored.