subject: Business Email [print this page] Business Email Business Email
The day has long past when business emails were considered aninformal way to communicate with colleagues, customers, or management. Business people must accept the fact that emails are commonly used but are also a formal and even legal form of communication. How can you make sure that you represent your company and yourself in a professional manner without being too "stuffy?" Here are a few rules to keep in mind:
Do not ever use all caps in an email. Using all capital letters in business emails is about as appropriate as walking into your bosses office unannounced and yelling at him. It does not matter what you are saying -- you're delivery is off!
Try and stay away from "..." and exclamation points. Again, these can relay the wrong message and send a message that you were not intending to send. Misunderstanding in email is already common, you don't have to complicate it.
Remember that there is no tone or inflection of voice in email, so you should always read your emails aloud to make sure they sound correct to you. If they sound confrontational or unclear to you, the reader will be just as confused.
Try to stay away from overuse of smiley faces and emoticons. In business, if you are speaking to a colleague, this may be acceptable, but practice makes perfect and you do not want to send a reminder invoice out to a customer with a smiley face attached. Wrong message.
Keep it simple. If you are using the thesaurus and dictionary to come up with words that sound intelligent for an email about an upcoming training, stop right there. Communicate just as you would face to face; odds are that you probably are not going to pick up a dictionary mid sentence to announce a mandatory training.
These are just a few simple rules that if followed, can make your business communications more effective, concise, and clear. Remember that you are a professional but you don't have to cram every word you learned in grad school into your email to get your point across.
